It *is* mine, dammit!

[tyggerjai]

SO this time, entrippy has said a lot of what I was going to, but I figured out last night what was bothering me about madi's position in this thread .
It's the mention of "public spaces". Because the WWW, and more specifically my LJ page isn't a public space. I know, you're all saying "He's gone *crazy* !". But it's true.

Madi and kitling are invoking the laws of Netiquette, which were begat by Usenet. And Usenet is a genuinely public space, for the following reasons.

You can always rely on the kindness of strangers
Usenet is co-operative. It's built on co-operation between strangers. When I post an article, it gets propogated to a number of machines (many of which are or were owned by Universities, governments, private individuals, etc). Other people are providing their resources as a co-operative. If I want my article to be read by other people, it has to be carried off into the Ether on other peoples machines, and other peoples bandwidth. SO a lot of the Usenet rules are built around the concept of respecting other peoples bandwidth and diskspace. Because if I don't have peers, I don't have an audience. Now, that may sound like LJ, but there's a crucial difference, that erudito can probably explain better than I. LJ servers are provided by "other people" , and you my reader may well be a random stranger. But in each case, there's a contract, be it explicit (I bought an LJ account) or implicit (you're choosing to view my page). There just aren't that many hops, and all of them are covered by a contract. Usenet is utterly different - the article may pass through a zillion servers , whose admins have contracts only with *other* admins, not with the people providing content. The contracts are all very loose and groovy, but admins say " I agree to carry traffic for *this group*, with the following understandings ...". If you are a member of that group, there's a much higher obligation to respect those admins you have never met. And to make it easier to be sure that you are respecting them, there's a central set of rules, to avoid having to negotiate each relationship individually. (And LJ is a private company. Never forget that. My contract is with them.)

The other thing that makes Usenet public is that the cost of my stupidity is unavoidably borne by other people. As soon as my message propogates, I've cost someone money - someone who has no contract with me and who never asked for my individual article. They carry a group, that group has rules, they expect me to obey those rules because otherwise they have to bear the cost (that's what made Usenet spam so popular - someone else bears the cost). Sure, as a news admin or even as a user I can explicitly configure my server not to accept posts that contain binaries, or that don't have a certain header, and as a user I can configure my killfile so I ignore you. But in each of those cases, the effort is on the part of the *recipient*. Other people. On the Web, I'm either "posting" to a forum like an LJ community, or slashdot (in which case yes, similar rules are probably relevant), or I'm posting to *my* LJ page, or *my* webpage. And that's not public. You have to come and ask for it.

And while we're on the topic of "public infrastructure", the internet isn't running on Uni servers as a public good anymore. The routers and proxies that webpages go through are largely owned by big private ISPS and carriers, and paid for by commercial arrangements with ISPs at the next tier down.All commercially negotiated and provided, so "public infrastructure" just isn't a powerful argument anymore.Here's a brief example:
9:30am@fatcat~>traceroute tyggerjai.livejournal.com
traceroute to livejournal.com (66.150.15.150), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 lioness (192.168.1.1) 0.715 ms 0.583 ms 0.571 ms
2 BNG-144-132-0-1.vic.bigpond.net.au (144.132.0.1) 23.373 ms 26.961 ms 17.797 ms
3 CPE-61-9-129-7.vic.bigpond.net.au (61.9.129.7) 5.834 ms 8.960 ms 57.607 ms
4 GigabitEthernet3-1.exc1.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.94.125) 15.682 ms 10.057 ms 12.788 ms
5 GigabitEthernet2-1.exi-core1.Melbourne.telstra.net (203.50.77.1) 17.094 ms 14.626 ms 11.014 ms
6 Pos6-0.chw-core2.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.17) 20.867 ms 36.477 ms 26.781 ms
7 Pos2-0.pad-core5.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.12.18) 25.465 ms 24.097 ms 28.766 ms
8 GigabitEthernet0-1.syd-core02.Sydney.net.reach.com (203.50.13.254) 26.213 ms 21.755 ms 24.932 ms
9 i-1-0.syd-core01.net.reach.com (202.84.143.133) 30.117 ms 22.012 ms 41.537 ms
10 i-9-2.sjc-core01.net.reach.com (202.84.143.13) 252.036 ms 268.516 ms 243.162 ms
11 i-13-0.paix-core01.net.reach.com (202.84.251.49) 225.446 ms 210.451 ms 255.196 ms
12 f0.pao1.verio.net (198.32.176.14) 218.594 ms 208.943 ms 213.181 ms
13 p16-1-1-0.r21.plalca01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.3.84) 214.820 ms 234.946 ms 212.324 ms
14 p16-0-1-1.r20.sttlwa01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.82) 233.818 ms 234.801 ms 264.640 ms
15 ge-0-1-0.a12.sttlwa01.us.ra.verio.net (129.250.28.20) 235.375 ms 239.552 ms 288.689 ms
16 d3-1-2-3.a12.sttlwa01.us.ra.verio.net (204.203.3.30) 228.952 ms 246.326 ms 231.826 ms
17 border6.ge4-1-bbnet2.sef.pnap.net (63.251.160.75) 252.464 ms 231.434 ms 242.631 ms
18 livejournal.com (66.150.15.150) 231.938 ms 232.788 ms 229.839 ms


That'll mean more to some of you than others, but what it says is this.
When I, at home, request a livejournal page, the request and subsequent serving of the page passes through machines belonging to the following:

Telstra. Private ISP, these days, with whom I have a commercial arrangement at their standard rates.
reach.com, a Hong-Kong based private ISP with whom Telstra presumably have commercial peering arrangements. Verio.net, a US based private ISP (NTT) with whom reach presumably have commercial peering arrangements.papnet, who are presumably livejournal's ISP, and finally livejournal.
Each and every hop bought and paid for on the marketplace by companies in it for the money. Not a whole lot of "public" there.No struggling individuals doing it for the love of it (except livejournal, and hey, I paid for my account). No university servers groaning under the load. No public infrastructure. Even if the infrastructure is public, my house isn't "public space" just because you have to drive on public roads to get there.

So how does this apply to LJ? It doesn't, which is my point. LJ servers are privately owned and run by a private company, and provide a service. Now, I don't think they're making much money, and they're giving their service away an awful lot, but that's not enough to make them "public". So when it comes to my LJ page, I've bought (in my case) or taken advantage of (in many cases) a service provided by a private company. It happens to be publically accesible by default, but that's not the same thing as a "public space". Someone else, who has purchased a service from their ISP, then browses my page. Think of art galleries, though that drags the whole "what is art" debate into it. I'll try and steer clear of actual artistic debate, and just point out the following.
The Australian National Gallery, or the National Gallery of Victoria are public spaces. Government owned, largely taxpaye funded, public galleries. So you, as a taxpayer, have input into what goes in them. You can write to your local member, complain to the board, whatever, and they have a certain level of obligation to listen. Fair enough. But there's a privately owned art gallery on Smith St, just around the corner from my house. Every morning it opens its doors to all comers. Publically accessible - everyone can wander in and look at the art. And sure, you *could* complain about it, or write letters to the board, but see how far it gets you. They have absolutely no obligation to listen to you about *anything* unless they are breaking the law. Usenet may well be a public gallery - it's a co-operative, the cost is borne by others, etc. But my webpage, on a server I paid money for, with a privately negotiated contract, is a whole other story.It's publically accessible, but it ain't a "public space". It's mine. I let you look at it, and you can look at it or not, as you like. But if you don't like my blink tags, tell you what, you can sod right off.

The Web, in short, is not a "public space" the way Usenet was. I'm not pushing my webpage out to dozens of servers and relying on the politeness and resources of their admins. I'm buying me a piece of a server somewhere, and waiting quietly for someone to come along and read what I have to say. And that changes the rules dramatically.

sol.
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Comments

Re: Circles are fun

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

No.
For the reasons above.
I'm sitting here clapping, and you're *listening*.
That's what adding me to your friends page *means*.
The analogy isn't "talks to me", it's "listens to me.".
Which again changes things completely. You're not trying to talk to me. That's what *your* journal is for. You wanna talk, do it there. If you're adding me to your friends page, it's because you want to *listen*. And then you're complaining about the fact that I communicate by clapping, not talking.

The passive vs active, listening vs talking thing is really, *really* important here, and I don't seem to be communicating that.

It's like going to study with a Zen master and asking him to please stop hitting you over the head with that stick. That's how he teaches what he has to teach, and if you don't like it, *you* are in the wrong place. He doesn't need to stop hitting you, you need to go study with someone who doesn't hit you.

sol.
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Re: Circles are fun

[madigrrl.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'm gonna complain that you're communicating by clapping, not talking, if there's a
rule that says "people communicate by talking". Let's argue the existence of that rule, 'coz
I think that's what it all comes down to.

...except I find myself drastically incapable of doing so. I need an ethicist, a
sociologist, Steve Crocker, Stephen Jay Gould and a goodly amount of beer to collate my
argument properly, which I suspect means that what I'm resting on really is personal
opinion rather than anything else. However, I'm gonna throw down the gauntlet (consisting of
mashed up bits and pieces of all of the above) and say that I don't think you can prove the
non-existence of that rule without a similar set of input.

Re: Circles are fun

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ain't no such rule.
Cos I can be standing in a lift with Damien and Thorfinn, and suddenly have them in fits of laughter by humming _The Girl from Ipanema_.
Humming, not singing. No words.
People communicate in a zillion different ways - people have different ways of expressing themselves, people have contexts you don't share.

Again, I reject the clapping analogy, but people communicate by sharing mutually meaningful data. Often, that's words. Sometimes it's glances, sometimes it's music, sometimes it's physical contact. But even here on LJ, there's no such rule. If, instead of my "I found a computer" post, I'd posted "No dear, you have enough computers.", that would have been understood and hilariously funny to three people. If that's all the people I care about, that's my choice. And if you don't get it, that's neither my problem, nor my fault. If I'd posted a picture of the computer room, I would have been conveying a slightly different message. And *I* am choosing how to impart that message, because *I* am the one communicating. Not only *what* I say, but *how* I say it is my choice.

If I choose to use clapping because I really, really think that I can only get my message across by clapping, then I have to live with the fact that maybe you don't speak clap. If it really matters to me that you understand, then maybe I'll try another way. But no, even (especially) on Livejournal, there's no rule that says people communicate by talking. Let me open your eyes to a whole new way of communicating. And if you sit there long enough, hey, maybe you'll understand what I'm trying to communicate. And maybe that'll enrich us both. But if you say "clapping weirdo", and walk off, then you're making the assumption that I'm not trying to communicate *with you*. And that may very well be true. But so what? You may not be my intended audience. I may be trying to attract people who have become so disillusioned with speech that they want to clap.

And if we persist in the silly analogy, I invite you to think about your social group for a second. Imagine what *would* happen if, at Renees midsummer party, or Doc and Leah's New Year, what would have happened if I hadn't spoken to anyone all night, but only clapped. Care to lay odds on the chances of an impromptu human percussion groove happening? I don't find it dificult to see one of our parties turning into a little drumming circle and totally going off, just because I didn't feel ilke talking much.

sol.
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Re: Circles are fun

[meleah.livejournal.com]

Man, that would have been sweet. THat's it, next party I expect an impromptu percussion group, or else!