Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. It originally appeared in Russian in the Oct. 1992 issue of ReNews, an electronic journal which originates in Moscow.
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Today, many people at universities and high tech companies work and play in a vast interconnected electronic environment. As a writer, I am fascinated not by the whiz-bang technology that makes this possible, but rather by what people do with it and the kinds of relationships people build with one another as a result.
Soon these resources should become available to the general public. The vast, government-subsidized network -- Internet -- is going to be privatized and eventually opened to individual consumers. Already, some people are investing in expensive alternatives that provide some of the same kinds of services.
Perhaps a few anecdotes, based on my experience on the Internet, can help show how these new capabilities can be useful and fun, and what this change in human relations might lead to.
A popular board-game called Diplomacy fills many of these requirements. It involves seven players, each of whom represents a European country; and it is won on the basis of negotiating skills, rather than chance. (The game map which has such country names as "Serbia" and "Ukraine," looks much more contemporary today than it did a year ago.)
At the time the Monitor article appeared, my son and I were involved in a 17-player variant of Diplomacy over Digital Equipment's worldwide computer network. The other players were scattered around the U.S. and Europe. Most of the players had never met one another and knew nothing about one another except what they learned from the private electronic correspondence that flowed rapidly and regularly among them.
The board game allows 15 minutes between moves for the participants to talk to one another privately and make deals. A complete game typically takes less than 12 hours.
Over the network, we had a week between moves, and the negotiations and alliances became far more complex and interesting. The moves themselves and messages from the moderator were posted in a "notes file," a common file space which everyone could access. Secret alliances of more than two players set up separate notes files to speed their negotiations with one another. False alliances were also formed -- where two or more parties invited one or more others under the pretext that they would work together long-term, but with secret agreements and separate discussions on when and how to "stab" the invitees. This particular game (CHAOS III) lasted about four months, led to the generation of many hundreds of pages of very creative persuasive writing, and ended in a three-way tie.
While not intended as an educational experience, this game was far more effective than a course in negotiation skills for managers. It also helped me learn how to make full use of notes files and electronic mail as a business tool -- to help people at remote sites work together as a team, and to arrive at agreement on strategies and policies with a minimum of face-to-face meetings.
In the process of playing, my son and I learned a lot about how people behave in the electronic environment. My son, Bobby, who was 15 then and is a National Master in chess, was the real player. I acted as the go-between, connecting to the network by modem to relay the correspondence he wrote on our word processor. It was interesting watching him learn how to influence and persuade adults on the other side of the world who had no idea who he was, or what his age was. The sex, color of skin, culture, and physical looks of the participants also had no effect on the course of the game. All that mattered was the words transmitted electronically: how cogent the arguments were, and how well they were expressed.
This experience is what brought home to me clearly that the network is a levelling mechanism, helping create a more democratic workplace today at Digital Equipment. And probably as networks like this become more generally accessible, the same effect should spread to large parts of society, around the world.
When shocking events occur in remote parts of the world, first-hand accounts are rapidly disseminated over the Internet -- not what the New York Times chooses to publish, or what the television networks use to fill the time between commercials, but what the student with a PC in Sarajevo sees through his window as the shelling continues in his neighborhood. Events like the massacre at Tianamen Square, the Gulf War, and the civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia have triggered huge volumes of traffic on the Internet -- Much of it opinion from the uninformed, but interspersed with nuggets of true insight and clear first-hand description. And the senders of these messages from the heart of the trouble spot can use the Internet to stay in touch with what is happening elsewhere in the world and how the rest of the world is reacting to and responding to their crisis. They can also be answered directly by electronic mail, and can sometimes forward messages to and for their neighbors.
On the Internet, one of the forms this sharing takes is through "newsgroups." Like notes files, newsgroup software makes it possible for individuals with common interests to post their messages to a group rather than an individual. This group correspondence builds and maintains a sense of community among people who happen to be geographically scattered. Newsgroups are also useful for scanning the latest news about subjects of concern to you and immediately following up on opportunities that surface. In addition, they serve as an important resource when you have an obscure question and need an answer quickly.
A few personal examples:
1) My daughter, Heather, needed to write a paper for school about a woman mathematician. She had no names to start with, and librarians were stumped by the request. I posted the question in the newsgroup sci.math; and within two days, I received replies from 60 individuals from around the world. Many of the people who answered were in universities; some were professors. They provided the names of over two dozen prominent women mathematicians, brief bios of many of them, and very complete bibliographic references.
2) The daughter of a friend at work had to get a recipe from Nepal, as a school assignement. I posted the question in soc.culture.nepal. (Yes, the Nepalese have their own newsgroup). Within a day, I received a recipe from a Napalese student at the University of Western Australia, and the phone number of a student from Nepal who was attending MIT.
3) A friend of my wife's works for the U.S. office of a Norwegian fish company. They were finding that sales of salmon to restaurants in the Boston area were hampered by the fact that the fish had not gone through kosher inspection at the point of origin. She wanted to locate a conservative Orthodox rabbi who could perform such inspections in Norway. I posted to soc.culture.jewish and also to a Digital Notes File called BAGELS and within a day I had the name and number of two individuals who could do the job. One works out of New York and flies around the world; the other, who lives in Norway, now does the inspections for them.
"I have a unique set of chess games that might be of value to research in artificial intelligence or to developers of chess-playing software. I have been saving my son Bobby's games as word processing files since the very first rated game he played in Oct. 1984. There are now 680 rated games on file -- a continuous record from 9-year-old raw beginner to 14-year-old master. I believe that analysis of these games could provide valuable information about how one can learn and improve rapidly at chess. In the best of all possible world, I could foresee a valuable collaboration. "
I soon got a reply from Bob Levinson, assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). Funded by the National Science Foundation, his chess-playing program, Morph, was a departure from the "brute-force" programs that have recently captured the headlines for their accomplishments against human grand masters. Those machines use high speed circuits to search deeply through many possible lines of play. Morph on the other hand "learns from its mistakes." It's already a competent player, and it gets better from its own experience, rather than from humans specifically telling it how to evaluate a particular position and what move is best in such-and-such a case. He was interested in using Bobby's games to "train" Morph, and having Bobby act as a consultant on the project.
I was able to send all the games (about a thousand pages of text) very quickly over the Internet. Since then we've sent him Bobby's new games as they are played -- about 200 more. And Bob Levinson and Bobby have carried on an intermittent dialogue about the project through electronic mail.
This summer Bobby will have an account on a computer at UCSC which he will be able to access over the Internet (using the "telnet" command) from the word processor in the basement of our house in Boston. That will enable him to play a more active role in the project. And in the future (as soon as he learns the C computer language), Bobby could actually write code for the project, working on-line at a distance of 3,000 miles.
The importance of this capability was made clear to me at a press conference with Russian officials at DECWORLD in Boston. The Chairman of the State Committee on Informatics and the director of a top scientific institute in Moscow described the current crisis in Russian science.
Jump-starting the free-market economy has led to an exchange rate that means a typical Russian scientist earns the equivalent of about $200 -- not $200 a week or even a month, but $200 a year. Naturally, with the end of restrictions on emigration, the temptation to leave for lucrative employment in the West is tremendous. And those scientists who stay now find themselves isolated from the world scientific community.
Before, thanks to government subsidies, scientists could travel to conferences and had access to all the latest scientific literature. Now, because of economics, they are cut off. A year's subscription to a western technical journal can cost the equivalent of one year's salary. And round-trip airfare to New York, to attend a conference, costs the equivalent of four years' salary.
Communication is the life-blood of science. Without it, Russian science will fall behind the rest of the world and become second-rate, unable to make significant contributions, and unable to prepare succeeding generations of top-level scientists. This would be a loss not just for Russia, but for the world.
"What about the Internet?" I asked. For the last couple years I have corresponded with a friend in Moscow over the Internet. I presumed that those who had access would be able to use it like we do here, as a gateway to tremendous libraries of information and a link with the worldwide scientific community.
But the telecommunications infrastructure in Russia is antiquated and unreliable. Messages from the Internet can get through, but it takes a day or two for them to arrive and, typically, a third are lost due to technical difficulties and inefficiency. And the more sophisticated capabilities, such as access to distant computers, either aren't available or aren't practical because of the slowness of response.
Long-term, they have to rebuild their telecommunciations infrastructure, which will take many years and huge investments from western governments and businesses. But immediately, to preserve and revitalize serious top-level science in their country, they need high-speed links between key institutes in Russia and the Internet. With such links, Russian scientists could stay in touch with other leaders in their fields and keep up to date on the latest developments at low cost. And opportunities would rapidly open up for them to do significant work for foregin businesses at a distance, over the network. That way western businesses could benefit from their knowledge and talents, and the scientists would be able to earn western currency while staying in their homeland.
Yes, work at a distance is more than a curiosity and a game -- for Russia today, it is a necessity.
Sometimes participants who live close to one another arrange for face-to-face social get-togethers. Then when they move back to the electronic realm, their messages take on a more personal tone. But when it comes to critical judgement, the network still seems to foster impartial candor.
Many of the joys of the Internet come from the fact that everything doesn't have to be structured and organized. You don't have to ask and wait for permission from some authority. In many cases, you can simply exercise your imagination and initiative, within the the bounds of good sense and good taste.
When my son Bobby wrote a high school history paper on "The Role of Bobby Fischer as a Cold War Symbol," I thought that maybe some of the people who read rec.games.chess might be interested in reading it. So I posted a brief note there asking if anyone would like me to send a copy electronically. (He had written it using our word processor at home, so it was a simple matter to transfer it up to the network and send it.) About 70 people from all over the world asked for it. A couple dozen replied directly once they had read it. Most were complimentary and grateful. Some pointed out minor inaccuracies: a typo in a date and a footnote number omitted from the text. One person took issue with a peripheral statement in the footnotes and started a discussion on that in the newsgroup. Bobby fixed the mistakes, acknowledged them in the newsgroup, and offered to send the revised copy to any who asked.
In other words, in the electronic environment, it is possible for an article or paper which deals cogently with a topic of general interest, to undergo informal peer review on the network, to be forwarded and copied many times all over the world, and to be shared freely by all who are interested.
As a variant of that approach, some electronic "publications" are all-inclusive and unedited, consisting of electronic correspondence on a common topic that has been gathered automatically or by a moderator, for redistribution to a list of "subscribers." In some cases, individual messages are redistributed separately rather than combined.
Kidsphere, started by Professor Bob Carllitz at the University of Pittsburgh, uses this capability to resend to everyone who has asked to be put on the list any message sent to the main Kidsphere address. These same messages are also posted as a newsgroup (for those who prefer to read them that way rather than as mail). In practice a huge community has grown -- K-12 teachers and students all over the world sharing useful tips and the wonders they have uncovered in exploring the vast and rapidly growing resources of the Internet.
A community of enthusiasts from a wide variety of academic disciplines, Kidsphere participants on a typical day might include a high school teacher from New Zealand getting his students involved in a weather project; a biology teacher from England looking for courseware she could use on a Macintosh; or a third-grade teacher in Detroit looking for electronic penpals for his class. They tell how to use the Internet to freely access the catalogues of major libraries around the world or how to log in to public files at NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. They also promote the projects of their students, who are starting their own electronic newspapers or need practice writing in foreign languages.
The enthusiasm and the diversity of interests is awe-inspriring, and the volume of the messages (an average of about 50 a day, some of which can run many pages) is simply too much for any one person to absorb.
Projects overlap. One effort helps another. People who run large computer centers let their machines be used as repositories for information and software and provide free and open access to anyone on the network anywhere in the world.
For example, many of the world's greatest books are now in electronic form, sitting in open files, intended for anyone who wishes to copy and redistribute them anywhere, at no cost. In about two minutes you can copy the entire King James Bible from a computer on the other side of the continent.
The most orderly and disciplined effort to make great works readily available in this form to libraries, schools and individuals is known as the Gutenberg Project. Their selections include the 1990 Census, Roget's Thesaurus, and the 1991 CIA Book of Facts, as well as such literary works as Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, and Wuthering Heights. Other systems have the complete works of Shakespeare. New books are being input and carefully proofread every month by dedicated individuals who donate their time and effort to this cause.
This project is near to my heart. "Why?" my son asks. "What good is it?" The people running the project say they want to have over a 1000 great books in electronic form, so they can be provided free over the network or for neglible cost on compact disk to libraries everywhere. More immediately, I could imagine a high school English teacher giving everyone in the class a floppy disk with Wuthering Heights and asking them to rewrite a chapter or two. Or I could imagine a drama teacher using an electronic copy of Hamlet to edit it down for a two-hour high school production and print out copies for the whole cast.
But the real source of my enthusiasm is far more impractical. I like to look up at the shelf above my personal computer and know that in those floppy disks I have Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, The Heart of Darkness, The Federalist Papers, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. Somehow, irrationally, I sleep better at night knowing that electronic copies of works like these are scattered throughout the world, and that they can be sent in seconds to thousands of new destinations. It gives me a sense of comfort to think that as long as there are free and open international computer networks, book burning is a futile exercise.
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