![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was in college when I found out about the Internet. It was right after ARPAnet. Bulletin boards were the hot chat item. Unix was the operating system and C was its language. The internet didn't have a capital "I" yet and the World Wide Web wasn't even a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
I was amazed at how open the system was. If I knew someone's address, I could "talk" or "msg" them, and it would show up. They didn't have to know me. I didn't have to fill in a captcha to get my message there. I met and made my best internet friends through a random trolling of one Voodoo Monkey who showed me the ways of MU*.
There, I encountered my first spam. Now, we all know spam as "junk" email with possible viruses or other malware for spice, but back then spam was anything that decreased the signal-to-noise ratio. So scripts and macros that automatically dumped a screenload of text or an ASCII picture could be conversation-stoppers.
There's a whole science experiment here about how, with the limited sensory input of the web (largely visual), it's hard to keep our mind on what's going on when the scenery changes in the blink of an eye. At least, that's what happened in those proto-chatrooms: The macro would scroll all the current conversation off the screen, and we'd all have to figure out where we were, or start over.
Since then, the attacks on STN have been ever increasing in variety, including every kind of subject changing, verbal bullying, and logical fallacy, but they have been mostly confined to the internet. When Anonymous (I suspect the /b/-tards, but I'm not a 4chan-er) rolled on the Oregon Tea Party, they did a basic STN attack. Whatever they could throw, they threw, and the OTP server was worthless for the purpose it was set up for. Did they break it? Shut it down? Or just cover up on topic posting with their napalm and light a match? I don't know. I know it worked.
And I know that Tea Party members went to Town Hall meetings during the presidential campaign and stopped the Signal with their Noise.
I don't need to be attacking Anonymous, 4chan, Republicans, Democrats, or Tea Party-ers to know that we're not moving forward and we're not solving problems as long as we are distracted by the Noise. I bet you can all think of some much more attractive nuisances that are keeping you from getting something done RIGHT NOW.
I was amazed at how open the system was. If I knew someone's address, I could "talk" or "msg" them, and it would show up. They didn't have to know me. I didn't have to fill in a captcha to get my message there. I met and made my best internet friends through a random trolling of one Voodoo Monkey who showed me the ways of MU*.
There, I encountered my first spam. Now, we all know spam as "junk" email with possible viruses or other malware for spice, but back then spam was anything that decreased the signal-to-noise ratio. So scripts and macros that automatically dumped a screenload of text or an ASCII picture could be conversation-stoppers.
There's a whole science experiment here about how, with the limited sensory input of the web (largely visual), it's hard to keep our mind on what's going on when the scenery changes in the blink of an eye. At least, that's what happened in those proto-chatrooms: The macro would scroll all the current conversation off the screen, and we'd all have to figure out where we were, or start over.
Since then, the attacks on STN have been ever increasing in variety, including every kind of subject changing, verbal bullying, and logical fallacy, but they have been mostly confined to the internet. When Anonymous (I suspect the /b/-tards, but I'm not a 4chan-er) rolled on the Oregon Tea Party, they did a basic STN attack. Whatever they could throw, they threw, and the OTP server was worthless for the purpose it was set up for. Did they break it? Shut it down? Or just cover up on topic posting with their napalm and light a match? I don't know. I know it worked.
And I know that Tea Party members went to Town Hall meetings during the presidential campaign and stopped the Signal with their Noise.
I don't need to be attacking Anonymous, 4chan, Republicans, Democrats, or Tea Party-ers to know that we're not moving forward and we're not solving problems as long as we are distracted by the Noise. I bet you can all think of some much more attractive nuisances that are keeping you from getting something done RIGHT NOW.
