We will see Raven be accused of making harassing and threatening phone calls, when this site is updated. Here's a partial look at the discussion in which the issue came up.

If you've followed this online in the past, you've probably heard the claim that Loki and her friends could use call trace to know that Blackbane was calling. This link will lead you to a series of references that will show that Loki was lying, when she made this claim herself.

One brief point I would add to this discussion would be to suggest that life in groups such as these might be improved by a change of, not so much one of software or policy, as one of outlook. I would suggest that there is something intrinsically unwholesome about devoting a large portion of one's social life to interacting with a computer screen. Perhaps we should see the Internet not so much as a meeting place, as a way of letting people know that we are here and what we are about, so that they will know where to meet us or where to find our writings offline, and will have some idea of whether or not they wish to do so. The Internet shouldn't be a full fledged forum, it should be a portal to a number of forums. It should be a tool for networking.

A line that was offered by Susan Profit on alt.religion.wicca was especially telling. She said that it was unreasonable for somebody who was libeled in that group to object, because this wasn't "real life". Yes, as a figure of speech, we do draw that distinction, but should it blind us to the fact that on the other side of the computer screen are real flesh and blood human beings, whose lives are affected by their reputations? On some gut level, it is as if Susan feels that she is the only real human on the net, and all the rest of us are but simulations created by the computers she is feeding her posts into.

This solipsistic illusion is an easy one to fall into, because the Net doesn't give us the full richness of sensory experience that makes human contact feel real. We need to hear each other's voices, hear the music in the background, be able to look each other in the eye, and watch life happen around us. That is what human contact is, the stuff memories are made of. It is what the decade of the 1990s hadn't given us and what the Net can never give us.

Yes, the Net can have value. It can help us find each other in a vast world in which we are so often lost. But when it becomes the place where we go to have experiences, instead of where we go to find them, experience is exactly what we miss out on. We lose our ability to see each other as being fully real - to empathise with each other - and that spark of life, of spontanaeity within us, that feeds on the surprises and the challenges that real experience bring, begins to die. We begin to become the kind of people who would want to hide from others behind that blue screen. If we go far enough in that direction, we'll have good reason to want to hide from each other, at least in the moment.

It's a matter of not losing perspective.

If we limit the Net to being the tool to facilitate live contact and discussion it was meant to be, at any one time, it will occupy the attention of a few, and yet be in contact with communities populated by a great many. Should it begin to drift strangely far from reality, to the point of regaining its current notoriety, its' population will soon be swamped by the curious and the incredulous, whose criticism, and yes, whose mockery, will serve to bring our netizens back to reality. That is, if people are ever on long enough for their ties to the unreality of the virtual community to become stronger than their healthier ones to the community offline.

But if people are only darting in and darting out of Usenet, or the bulletin boards, as the need presents itself, then they should be regularly (and quickly) shaking off the effects of the Net, before it can seriously affect them. Also, experience tells us that extremely transient communities don't tend to be very talkative or closely knit ones, and for once, we are looking at a community that we SHOULDN'T want to see become very closely knit. Without people hanging around, it becomes much harder to gather the rabble together to form a lynch mob. And so life online, in being limited, would become far calmer, and far more wholesome. But is that entirely a good thing?

One might ask if in making the Net more as it once was, if we'd be luring people back into it and restarting the cycle. The answer should be "no". Usenet flourished because of an atmosphere of pointless hostility that had become prevalent offline. People were afraid to make conversation, because they might be beaten up by somebody with a hair trigger temper, cited for a violation of a speech code, charged with "sexual harassment" for asking somebody what time it was ... But if we have a healthy and vibrant social network in place, and people can find people to talk to in real life, even the Net, at its best, won't be able to compete with that. We won't be renewing the old cycle. Perhaps we'll be starting a new one, one we've forgotten how to imagine.

In the meanwhile, though, you might want to take stories like this as the cautionary tales they are. Maybe you're tempted to socialise "just a little". And somebody goes out of his way to make you angry, because he thinks it's funny. You argue back, but you can't really yell online, or confront the person making you made. There is no satisfaction. And sombody, in perfect safety, needles you a little more. Before you know it, you've been sucked in and it's only going to get worse.

It's a note you're going to hear a lot on this page. Here, when I speak of limiting the social character of Usenet, I'm not talking about putting timers on people's accounts. I'm talking about raising the consciousness of people going in, because in this case, the simple pursuit of self-interest on the part of the participants will achieve the desired goal. People just have to know what they're getting themselves in for.

Both online and off.

If you wish to leave, and go on to other things, then you can return to one of these pages ...

1. The "meeting the people" page
2. The "... and sometimes we stumble" main page

or you could check the Webring list on the "Tempest in a Teapot" page.