Sky-Writing, Or, When Man First Met Troll
Sky-Writing, Or, When Man First Met Troll
Editor's note: Stevan Harnad wrote the following essay in 1987 while at Princeton just as the Internet we know coalesced into being. It describes his first experience with a troll and then a flame war on a USENET bulletin board. I repost it for three reasons: 1) As Clive Thompson put it when he tweeted the essay yesterday, "some things haven't changed!" Which is satisfying to my brain at least. We *have* a culture on this here Internet, for good or ill. 2) Going back to such a finely observed primary document lets us feel the strangeness of the Internet again. This was something new unto the world! 3) I wish Harnad's term for Internet discourse -- skywriting -- had caught on. From his place in cognitive science, he intuited early on that Internet culture was something like a return to oral culture, as you can find summarized in his later paper, "Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought."
skywriting, email, Internet, flaming, linguistics, gender, Berkeley, unix, trolls
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
25 May 2011
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Harnad, Stevan
(2011)
Sky-Writing, Or, When Man First Met Troll.
The Atlantic, Spring Issue.
Abstract
Editor's note: Stevan Harnad wrote the following essay in 1987 while at Princeton just as the Internet we know coalesced into being. It describes his first experience with a troll and then a flame war on a USENET bulletin board. I repost it for three reasons: 1) As Clive Thompson put it when he tweeted the essay yesterday, "some things haven't changed!" Which is satisfying to my brain at least. We *have* a culture on this here Internet, for good or ill. 2) Going back to such a finely observed primary document lets us feel the strangeness of the Internet again. This was something new unto the world! 3) I wish Harnad's term for Internet discourse -- skywriting -- had caught on. From his place in cognitive science, he intuited early on that Internet culture was something like a return to oral culture, as you can find summarized in his later paper, "Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought."
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harnad-atlantic-skywriting.pdf
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Published date: 25 May 2011
Keywords:
skywriting, email, Internet, flaming, linguistics, gender, Berkeley, unix, trolls
Organisations:
Web & Internet Science
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Local EPrints ID: 343174
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/343174
PURE UUID: d8c00fc0-75d1-426f-9723-6bbc52da4d2f
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Date deposited: 25 Sep 2012 00:32
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:48
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Stevan Harnad
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