Mendicant Sysops in Cyberspace

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

TidBITS#225/09-May-94
=====================


Copyright 1990-1994 Adam & Tonya Engst. Details at end of issue.
   Automated info: <info () tidbits com> Comments: <ace () tidbits com>
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Mendicant Sysops in Cyberspace
------------------------------
  by Nick Arnett <nicka () mccmedia com>
  Copyright (c) 1994 Nick Arnett, Campbell, Calif., USA


  "Convergence," the hot buzzword to describe the crossovers between
  computing and communications, is not new, even though the
  technologies are. Today's convergence mirrors the European 15th
  century intersection of printing and cheap paper. Prior to then,
  in order to get many points of view of a subject as a scholar, you
  had to travel from library to library, since the extremely
  valuable hand-made manuscripts were chained to tables. As you read
  each manuscript, you had to figure out its organization and
  structure, a difficult task because each "publisher" tended to
  have its own methods. Many of the clues that we take for granted,
  including punctuation (!), weren't invented or weren't
  standardized. You couldn't take notes, since paper was difficult
  to come by, so you had to memorize all sorts of obscure
  information, including idiosyncratic clues to the organization and
  structure of the manuscripts.


  Today, as we work on our modern technological convergence, we have
  reproduced the confusions and frustrations of the 15th century in
  cyberspace. We find ourselves wandering (albeit quickly) from Web
  server to FTP site to WAIS source to newsgroup, hoping to stumble
  across something interesting, but most of the time we can't
  quickly figure out how the owners or managers of the information
  organized their stuff. It often takes time just to determine that
  the desired piece of information does not in fact exist at the
  given site.


  We memorize strange access codes, path names, Uniform Resource
  Locators, and other idiosyncrasies of the online sources. There
  are no standard title pages, tables of contents, indexes, or
  punctuation, and there are few (if any, depending on your range)
  navigational tools that span the various islands of information.
  We've even created new punctuation - "emoticons" that help avoid
  misunderstood humor, for example.


  Current events mirror the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe. A
  professor puts some papers on the Internet to share with his peers
  and finds that to his surprise and dismay, people all over the
  world read and interpret them in ways unintended. This echoes a
  recorded conversation between Martin Luther and Pope Leo X, in
  which Luther said, "It is a mystery to me how my theses, more so
  than my other writings, indeed, those of other professors, were
  spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our
  academic circle here... They were written in such a language that
  the common people could hardly understand them."


  The Wittenberg church door was Usenet for Luther's community. The
  printing press, like today's Internet connections, made it cheap
  and easy for many new people to get copies, including some who,
  scandalously, wished to make money by printing them - the "Wired"
  magazines of the mid-Renaissance.


  The dissemination of Luther's theses was the pope's own fault,
  depending on your view of ultimate responsibility. Leo X had
  proclaimed that souls in purgatory could have their sins paid via
  indulgences - printed papers, often bearing religious images. The
  pope's decision allowed the bishop of Mainz, Germany, to raise
  money for a building project by having a local fellow, named
  Gutenberg, and others print lots of indulgences. The printers,
  hungry for more work, started scouting around for sensational
  stuff that would sell well among the common folk. Apparently, the
  ancestors of "Hard Copy" came across Luther's theses nailed to the
  church door and said to themselves, "Hey, copyright law won't be
  invented for centuries, so we can make a fortune selling this
  stuff. It's heresy, and we all know how heresy sells!"


  Our information navigation problems are being solved by means
  quite similar to those of the 15th century. Just as the mendicant
  scholars of those days helped interpret, organize, and disseminate
  information in exchange for free room and board, today's
  "mendicant sysops" often trade free access to commercial online
  services in exchange for doing the grunt work of organizing,
  maintaining, and interpreting today's navigational nightmares.
  Like the educators, church, and businesses who supported mendicant
  scholars in the 15th century, universities and businesses provide
  "free" access to many of the volunteers who do this work on the
  Internet.


  These are the people inventing the punctuation of the global
  digital network, title pages, indexes, and catalogs. In doing so,
  they're forming new collaborations among education, science,
  business, the humanities, the arts, and all of the other human
  pursuits present on the net. And just as those collaborations
  produced some of the greatest fruit of the Renaissance after
  Gutenberg, by letting people see the world through new eyes, the
  net's great promise is to balance today's homogenized, mass-media
  information overload with easy access to many points of view.


  Who will choose the new punctuation, the new layouts, the new
  indexing schemes? For good or ill, it will probably be the same
  kind of people who chose them after the time of Gutenberg -
  publishers, eager to sell. Most publishers have seen digital
  networks primarily as an inexpensive distribution medium. We
  imagine that we can reap huge profits by saving the costs of
  printing, paper, and postage. On reflection, those seem not to be
  costs but falling barriers to entry. Publishers shouldn't expect
  profits to rise; they should expect competition to heat up. It's
  cheap - $2,500 plus $50 a month - to put a server on the Internet.
  The standard-setters won't necessarily be those with the deepest
  pockets. They'll be the people who figure out how to organize,
  punctuate, and navigate the terabytes of information that are only
  milliseconds away.


  Meanwhile, be careful what you nail to the digital church door.


                             ---


  Nick Arnett is president of Multimedia Computing Corp. While
  starting a new venture in information navigation, Arnett is also
  working on a project to begin rebuilding the Sarajevo library via
  the Internet (see the World-Wide Web server below  for more
  information).


http://nearnet.gnn.com/global-tea-party/sarajevo.html


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