From: news@wolves.Durham.NC.US (The Wolfe of the Den)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Usenet Culture, Part 2
Date: 23 Nov 92 19:20:57 GMT
Organization: Wolves Den UNIX
X-Md4-Signature: c9414078cae6b938c00b8c8320e59c69

gvh@metrosoft.com (Gordon Van Huizen) writes:
>In a previous post, I contrasted what I saw as two cultures on the net: for  
>sake of simplicity, an established culture and a new culture.

	I somehow managed to miss that distinction in my reading.  I'd
more categorize it as the folks who have internalized the culture and
"have become native" and the folks who have not yet internalized the
culture and haven't gotten used to it yet.

	The net.culture(s) are extremely diverse, and in most cases, the
pluralism is acknowledged and accepted.  There are a few places where
this turns into fraction, but more often the differences are recognized
and generally tolerated.

>There are a lot of people in the established culture that are willing to  
>converse and argue the issues. [etc...]

>There are also a number of people that are seemingly very interested in keeping
>Usenet a challenge. [etc...]

>aside from one or two lines, was two screenfulls of insults and barbs. It  
>included a "humorous" reference to "breaking my fingers to keep me from typing 
>for awhile". This person in the same letter claimed that *my* posts were  
>belligerent and that I should "shut up". [etc....]

>. This person responded that if I was bothered 
>by that line that I would have a difficult time dealing with Usenet.  

Please, DON'T tell me who this idiot is.  My bet is that they would
self-identify with the "computer priesthood" folk from Ted Nelson's
"Computer Lib"  It's the same sort of behaviour that leads to street
gangs and other dysfunctional social relationships.

Perhaps this person could really benefit from the proposed
"Technophilliacs Anonymous" sort of program.  I'm willing to bet that
they are denizens of the net for less than 8 years.

However, that you find only two groups here is a bit puzzling, since
there are (IMO) at least four groups in the model.  I've sort of got the
identities down for the groups, but I'm not sure what to label them.
The extreme groups are the "newbies" and the "netheads" - the newbies
can be excused as they do tend to learn [there is a subclass of netheads
that I call permanent newbies.]

Netheads are experienced in the technology of the net, they have a good
technical grasp of the situation, but they have absolutely NO social
comprehension of the net.  They feel that the net is a pure reflection
of their own social environment, and it conforms totally to their point
of view - everyone who disagrees with them is some kind of dweeb.  The
dysfunctions of this group are the problem children of the net.  I won't
name names, but everyone who is a news.group regular knows a few
netheads.

This leaves two other classes, the largest group of net.users are those
who read quietly, post reasonably, and tolerate (at the least) the
existence of other groups than the ones they read.  They may, in fact,
be opinionated and vocal about those opinions, but they don't call out
the net.national.guard when someone challenges their point of view (they
will drop someone in a killfile without rancor - with or without
annoucing the fact :-)   This is the most fuzzily defined group, and
holds the majority of net.readers and posters.

The final group is hardest to name but relatively easy to define.  It
consistes of folks who comprehend the net (grok, love, cherish, admire,
etc.  lots of possible words here) and actually work in their own way to
preserve/protect/defend/extend/etc  the net.  I would include most of
the net.dieties in this group, a large portion of its members are folks
who are news (or system) administrators.  Not all of these folk are
vocal, some are positively reticient, but their actions speak louder
than their words.  At the risk of being "offensive" I think for the
moment I call this the "elite" group :-)

The groups:
		newbies		(will move into other groups with time)
		net.users	(the overwhelming majority of folks)
		net.elite	(the "defenders" of the net)
		net.heads	(the bad boyz of the net)

I'll leave it up to you on where to classify the various folks on the
net belong  (I hope the definitions are clear enough to be useable.)
Should we add to this list?
-- 
Usenet Net News Administrator @ The Wolves Den  (G. Wolfe Woodbury)
news@wolves.durham.nc.us  news%wolves@cs.duke.edu  ...duke!wolves!news
"The flame war is a specific Usenet art form." --me
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