"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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Talbott is similarly critical of scanning -- a form of newsgroup speed-reading --, of which he speaks as an "almost universal habit" on the Net. He writes that "USENET newsgroups and high-traffic email discussion lists particularly encourage this habit. Few computer users seem to realise the damaging effects of scanning, which forces a superficial, abstract, associational reading of disjointed texts (if their contents are consciously noted at all)" (13). This puts little faith in the scanning abilities especially of experienced and regular newsgroup readers, however: these are likely to recognise posts by those participants whom they respect, and in those threads which they are interested in, will read these articles with a certain amount of attention, and then scan the rest of the newsgroup for further worthwhile posts and threads. (This tactic is similar to that of newspaper readers who attentively read articles from certain sections first, and then scan the rest of the paper.) Bit 36
Curiously, amidst an overly gloomy outlook Internet users have long come to expect from many commentators, Talbott himself also envisions such practices, when he predicts that "fringe Net phenomena such as flame wars, weird impersonations, the more bizarre forms of underground culture, pornographic commerce, manifestations of psychosis ... will grow increasingly pronounced and erratic, while at the same time the reasoned mechanisms for filtering 'strict business' from the more chaotic background noise of the Net will steadily gain in effectiveness" (209) -- what he does not consider, evidently, is that (perhaps computer-aided) scanning may very well be regarded as just such a 'reasoned mechanism'. Bit 37
Rather than in 'a superficial, abstract, associational reading of disjointed texts', then, the downside of scanning may prove to lie elsewhere: in its favouring of established, known participants and predictably interesting threads, it may create élite groups of 'important' users who alone are seen as determining conversational topics (thus threatening the Net's egalitarian basis), or may lead readers to confine themselves to threads from fields they are already familiar with (thus diminishing newsgroups' abilities to point towards new, but equally interesting developments). Finally, of course, both filtering and scanning may also reduce a reader's potential for interaction with the community, simply by reducing the amount of incoming posts a user could reply to. Bit 38

Section 3 -- Go on to Bite:

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© 1998 Axel Bruns