Date: Sat, 15 Feb 92 17:33:29 PST
From: G.Steinberg <steve@CS.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: File 6--Bury Usenet  (Intertek Reprint)

(Reprinted from _Intertek_, Winter (Vol 3.3), Winter, 1992. Pp 1-3.)

Bury USENET by Steve Steinberg

The concept of USENET, a global electronic bulletin board on which any
person can post messages on topics ranging from nanotechnology to
weightlifting and reach other interested people, sounds terrific. It
seems like a step towards the magical future which we are all brought
up to believe is right around the corner; the future of Hugo Gernsback
in which the entire bustling globe is united in productivity and
prosperity. But, just as genetic engineering and nuclear power have
turned out to cause more problems than they solve, we now see that
USENET improves productivity and our quality of life about as much as
TV does.  True, there are thousands of people who enjoy reading
USENET, just as there are millions who enjoy watching TV; however this
is not proof of the quaility of the medium but instead is indicative
of the lack of alternatives. It is therefore important to understand
why USENET fails as a medium so that we can avoid further blunders in
this direction.

The three general uses that a medium such as USENET should facilitate
are: directed information seeking, browsing, and collaboration.
Directed information seeking is when someone is trying to find out a
specific piece of information. Browsing is an exploratory
information-seeking strategy that is used when the problem is
ill-defined or when the user simply wants to become more familiar with
an area of knowledge. Lastly, collaboration, for the purposes of this
paper, refers to a group of people sharing what they know and posing
questions to each other about a particular subject so as to increase
the knowledge and ability of everyone involved.

USENET fails at all of these uses, and we can lump the reasons for the
failures into three main categories: USENET's asynchronous nature, its
small bandwidth, and the large amount of noise.

By asynchronous nature I simply mean that communications on USENET is
not in real time as it is with a telephone but instead is more like
conventional mail. Being asynchronous is not a problem with mail
because we communicate with relatively few people, so there are only a
small number of letters we need to remember and keep track of.
However, when we read hundreds of different messages by different
people on different subjects, we quickly get lost and forget what the
status is of all the various topic threads. A technique people use on
USENET to minimize the drawbacks of asynchronous communications is to
begin each message with the relevant portion of the message to which
they are replying. This repetition helps to some degree however each
message will still only contain some subset of the previous messages
(depending on which earlier messages caught the current writer's
attention) and so does not give a complete picture of what has been
determined on a particular topic. The asynchronous nature of USENET
makes collaboration very difficult. A topic will often start with a
question and then receive several messages in reply, each of which in
turn will spawn several replies. The topic will then quickly
degenerate into discussions of trivial points and multiple digressions
leaving the poster of the original question, and other readers, more
confused than helped. It is the sheer size of USENET, where a topic
thread can last for thousands of messages and many months, that makes
this problem so intractable.

In these post-MTV proto-multimedia days the idea of people writing to
each other seems almost quaint. Indeed one often hears professional
writers lament that the death of writing has occurred now that the
telephone has supplanted the letter. Hence, it might seem at first
blush that USENET is a good thing and will cause the rebirth of the
written letter. Unfortunately, as someone who has waded through tens
of thousands of USENET messages, I can say with some certitude that
this rebirth has not occurred, nor does it appear likely. To write
clearly and concisely requires skill as well as time. Because most
people lack one or the other of these requirements, messages posted to
USENET are usually confusingly worded, difficult to read, and prone to
misinterpretation. This is what I was referring to when I said in the
beginning that one of the fundamental problems with USENET is its
small bandwidth.  When we express our feelings on a subject or explain
a detailed technical matter, we usually use many cues and tools in
order to make ourselves understood. These include tone of voice, body
language, and pictures or diagrams. When we try instead to compress
our thoughts into 80-column ASCII, we leave behind many of the
nuances. This makes any use of USENET--whether it be searching or
collaborating--difficult since we often do not understand what a
message is really trying to say.

One solution to the problem of small bandwidth that seems likely to
catch on in a big way soon (it already has to some degree) is to allow
graphics to be viewed over USENET. This would allow a user to include
a drawn or digitized picture inside the message he or she posts.
Multimedia messages seem like a good idea, and you can easily imagine
the good uses possible such as diagrams to clearly indicate how
something works. However, I have no doubts, based on how people have
used USENET so far, that the main results would be an outbreak of
pornography and a rash of garish signatures.

Reading USENET is like drinking from a firehose, you'll get very wet
but you probably will still be thirsty. The problem is that there are
thousands of messages posted each day, but only a few of these will be
of interest to any one reader. Searching through this haystack of
messages is a tedious and laborious task with no sure method of
success. Many people end up spending (some would say wasting) several
hours a day reading USENET in order to find the few items of interest
and importance to them. What further complicates the task of searching
for information, making it near impossible as well as unpleasant, is
the huge amount of noise -- lengthy messages which say nothing useful,
messages that are personal attacks on someone, and messages that are
plain wrong.

Anyone with access to a UNIX machine that has a USENET feed can post a
message on any subject, no matter how unqualified the author may be.
The result is usually chaotic and unenlightening. Even when the poster
is humble enough to prefix his or her message with "I'm no lawyer
/scientist /doctor but...", a clear signal that we may save time and
skip this message, we only continue on to ten more messages by other
unqualified people berating the first poster for inaccuracies. The
dichotomy which is being exposed here is between a medium which
informs and a medium for general discussion. If we think USENET should
be the former, then there is no place for messages by unqualified
people.  If USENET should be for discussion, then indeed anyone should
be allowed to offer their opinion. Unfortunately USENET isn't very
good at this either due to the phenomena known as "flaming" in which
users attack other persons' views far more quickly and violently than
would occur with any other medium. Because users are safely hidden
behind their terminal, and can not see who they are talking to,
standard social customs concerning conversation do not seem to apply.
The result is that even the most innocent comment can provoke typed
vitriol from someone who feels offended. Flaming is undoubtedly the
most virulent form of noise, and there is nothing more unpleasant than
having to wade through messages of infantile bickering. So, although
USENET tries to be both a medium for informing as well as discussion,
it succeeds at neither.

The concept of a moderated newsgroup is a simple solution to the noise
problem, but it leads to a problem of a different kind.  In a
moderated newsgroup a user sends messages to the person in charge of
the newsgroup, and this moderator then picks only the messages he or
she feels are relevant. Sometimes this works well as in the often
cited example of Peter Neumann's RISK digest.  However, there is the
insidious danger of moderator bias. The specter of this problem has
risen in conjunction with the TELECOM digest which is moderated by the
rather opinionated Patrick Townsend. Whether Townsend actually censors
messages he disagrees with is not important. The perception--and the
possibility--are there.

To summarize, USENET's asynchronous nature makes collaboration
difficult, its small bandwidth makes messages difficult to understand
and easy to misinterpret, and the high amount of noise makes searching
for interesting messages time consuming and unpleasant.

I wish I could end by presenting five easy steps to improve USENET.
Unfortunately, the only ones which seem feasible, such as news readers
which use artificial intelligence techniques to filter out noise, are
merely stopgap measures which do not address all of the fundamental
problems. Before we can fix USENET we must first understand how we
learn and how groups work together. Until this has been determined our
tools are as likely to hinder our productivity as they are to help us.
As has been amply demonstrated by television over the last fifty
years, some mediums, no matter how much of a good idea they may seem,
just don't work. I hope we quickly learn to see USENET as a noble but
failed experiment so that we can research other directions in order to
find new mediums that really do enhance our communications and our
quality of life.

Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253