This may be the party line, but it's just plain not true. There are a
number of very involved structures that hold together usenet, from the
rituals needed to put together a Frequently Asked Questions posting to
the elaborate efforts to create a new newsgroup. Carefully and
meticulously one regular effort builds upon the other until you end up
with something that tho it was not planned as such as a very well
understood, formal, organized ritual existence.
Usenet is simply the collection of machines, on and off the
Internet, that happen to co-operate in doing the same thing. Assorted
individuals may or may not ``do Usenet'' as part of their job, but the
net as a whole isn't structured.
This is so far off as to be just laughable. Usenet includes hundreds of
backbone sites running in close synchronization around the globe
shoveling news at each other in times that are measured in minutes and
some times seconds. As it happens, these flows are not carefully
planned in advance; rather the system is in large part self-organizing
(the flooding algorithms) and self-regulating (the funding models) so
that there's not a need to orchestrate the whole bit from a top node.
That does not minimize the effort that has gone into organizing and
coordinating, just that most of that effort is quite invisible to the
rest of the net.
You can't ask what Usenet as a whole did or didn't do; that's not a
meaningful question. Usenet per se can't do anything, because there
is no such thing. Individuals have done whatever it is that has
been done.
That's way too reductionist an approach to be useful. Usenet can and
should also be measured in aggregate, with populations of people
behaving a certain way and organizations working toward their own ends
and employing individuals for the task. I can say fairly clearly and
without chance of being misunderstood that
Usenet does not like blatant commercialism.
Usenet is a good place to sell a used car.
are both true statements about the net.
The difference here is not terminological, it's substance. The words
are different because the reality is different.
--Steve Bellovin
(and yes, I know you've been around longer than I have, but I still
thing you're wrong.)
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 998 GLOB
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16