CU THEN AND NOW
by Russ_UK
page 2
And so ends my narrative. What are the biggest differences to how it was
then and how it is now? I think you can break this down into two areas,
social differences and technical differences.
The technical ones are easy to pick out. CU now has very high quailty
cololur video, something that was virtually undreamed of when I started.
Bandwidth speed has increased dramatically. Four years ago a
connection speed of 14,400 was the norm. PC Processing power has
increased 20 fold. Windows 95 and 98 have made it so much easier to
get things such as modems and video cameras to work, and as unstable
as you think Windows is now, it ise a million times more reliable than
Windows 3.1 ever was.
On the social side things are a lot less clearly defined. However, there
have been several major changes I would like to talk about.
The first one is that when I started the Internet itself was not really a place
where you would find "ordinary" people. Just to get a connection working
was technically challenging, and the cost of a PC and a dial up account, in
fact even the cost of a modem (I paid around $300 for my 28,000 modem)
were almost prohibitive to most people. There have to be social
implications to this. Everybody and their neighbour is now online. This is
probably a good thing, as the online population is now at least a little
closer to representing the population as a whole, although without doubt
there is still a bias towards higher income, higher educated, westerners.
When I first found CU, the Reflector Scanner did not exist. It was therefore
not an easy task to find a reflector to use. People guarded their own list
of favourite Reflector IP addresses very closely, only giving out the IP
addresses to those whom they felt would fit in to the atmosphere on any
particular reflector, to those people who took the time to get to know them
and to win their trust. The advent of the Scanner has changed this. All
anyone has to do to find a ref is to look on the scanner list, and then log on.
On a similar subject, Pay Membership reflectors did not exist either. The
owner in general paid for a reflector. They therefore only allowed people
there whom they wanted there. If you did not fit in you were not made
welcome. Reflectors tended to have a regular crowd of like-minded
people, with a transient element who either became integrated into the
group, or moved on if they did not fit in. The emergence of reflectors that
are run to make a profit has changed this. To gain access to a pay
reflector you do not need to gain the acceptance of the resident group,
you do not need to win the trust and friendship of people, all you need is
a credit card. Related to this I am sure is the fact that people now pay for
access to a reflector has raised their expectation levels. They forget that
they are not paying for content, but merely for the right of access.
The number of women on CU has increased dramatically too. It was not
unknown to log on to IBM every evening for a week and not see a female
once. This I am sure made the guys treat the ladies with a much greater
degree of respect than they do now. I don't mean the false suck up lines
either, they have always existed, but just the general way that the ladies
were made to feel welcome seems to me to have been much stronger
then. On a related point, as there were few women on the reflectors, it
was quite normal for guys to open each others vid whilst chatting. There
was little if any homophobia, it was just the done thing. If you were
talking to someone then they deserved the respect of you opening their
vid to see who you were talking to. I for one find the current
misconception that if you open another guy's vid that you must be gay,
to be one of the worst things that has happened in my time on CU.
Related again to Pay Reflectors in specific, but also to most reflectors,
Reflector Monitors did not exist either. I have very mixed feelings
about Refmons. At best Refmons can help to make sure that children
are not exposed to inappropriate material, and that those who
persistently cause trouble on a reflector are easily dealt with. At worst
Refmons can so dominate a reflector that they stifle it, imposing their
own morality, and preconceived ideas about what is or is not appropriate
behaviour. This I find particularly offensive. I am an adult, I am capable
of deciding if something is or is not for me. I do not need anyone else to
make that decision for me. If I don�t like what I see, then I don�t have to
look, and ultimately I (as does anyone else) always have the option of
clicking the disconnect button. I am sure that this applies to almost
everyone on CU, male or female.
Partly social and partly technical, CU did not have the facility to "Private
Chat". Personally I dislike private chat a lot. I do not mean that I dislike
it directed at me, as this rarely happens. I dislike the fact that it exists. In
so many cases, private chat is used to say things that the sender would
not dare say in public. How are people ever to learn social skills if they
never get feedback? If they say something publicly that is not acceptable
to the majority then they will soon find out about it. If they say that same
thing privately then all they will see is one person�s reaction, and they
will try the same thing again and again and again, until eventually they
may just learn how they are going to be received... or then again they
may not, and go through a long and difficult learning experience until
they eventually realise that there are better ways of doing things. Also,
I find that the mood of the ref is greatly enhanced if chat is kept public as
the people can use each others lines as openings, take feeds from them,
and just generally join in the chat.
The last observation I will make is that I feel people are now a lot less
careful with things relating to their online security. The freedom with
which some people reveal personal details about themselves worries
me sometimes. The naive way this information is given out to people
whom they may only have just met, about whom they know absolutely
nothing, really does disturb me. Not everyone online is what they appear
to be. Although the Internet is now a much more socially acceptable thing,
this does not directly relate to it being safe. I feel that the social
acceptability of being online and the fact that so many people you know
are now online has created a false sense of security. Just because your
"real life" friends and family and neighbours are now online does not
mean that everyone you meet will be as nice, or truthful, or trustworthy
as they are.
CU is still changing even now. WhitePine has recently released a new
product CU-Web that enables a version of CU to be run in a web browser
and allows the creation of conferences by individual users. I am sure that
there are still many other changes that are going to happen that I just
cannot imagine. One of the biggest attractions of Cu to me is the fact that
you just never know what is going to happen next. This applies equally
to the next 10 minutes as to the next 10 years! I for one know that I have
enjoyed every minute of my adventurous journey of discovery over the
last four years or more:
Let the adventure continue!
