But I didn’t. In fact, I suffered a major debacle; flame after flame from bystanders assailed me. Even though I told Robert Steele I wanted public answers, people felt that I had violated the traditional prohibition against quoting private posts in public, at least with names attached. Some of the bluntest Anglo-Saxonisms came from luminaries on the Internet. People wanted perfect freedom to speak their minds in messages deemed private, just as professors and students in class would want to be free to say outrageous things without ending up on the front pages of the local paper. I, on the other hand, had applied journalistic expectations to the Net. A reporter might end up with a better story if a celebrity exploded during an interview and this fact came out in print. But on the Internet, the freedom to be outrageous in private mattered more than the freedom to quote, even with advanced warning. Yes, I had questions about this custom. What if people took advantage of this Netiquette to engage in sexual or racial abuse, or just abuse, period? Should rules really be hard and fast? Just the same, in Net terms, I was the loser here because I wore my Writer Hat at the wrong time.
Luckily the story ended happily. Robert Steele and I, while disagreeing, made our peace. I went to one of his conferences and shook his hand. Later I happily discovered that he shared my hatred of the Clipper chip, the loathsome White House scheme to make it easier to snoop on citizens’ communications. He was far more openminded than I’d originally expected. Even without that consideration, however, a feud just didn’t make sense here. Canter and Siegel may claim you can reach 30 million people in one swoop, but as I say repeatedly, the Net is a series of communities, some of them rather small-townish. Within our somewhat overlapping circles, it would have been mutually harmful for Robert Steele and me to squander time and reputations on a protracted flame war.
Other kinds of clashes take place between Internet culture and that of traditional media types; in the eyes of many people on the Net, print people are not the only villains. Dateline NBC ran a story about children using computer connections to locate recipes for making bombs. The children, however, could have done the same at bookstores or public libraries. Dateline’s episode reminded one Netizen of the time NBC secretly used a hidden ignition system to show that an automobile could explode. Just as bizarrely, in print and on the air, some journalists love stories about the Internet as a playground for child molesters. If we on the Net were a religious or ethnic group, we could start an antidefamation league and keep it forever busy.
By Net standards, the media bumble in yet other ways. If you’re a newspaper or magazine journalist, you may have been reared to neuter yourself about The News; no opinions online, please. On the Net, however, many people are suspicious if you do not join the crowd and speak out. They dislike net-thropologists; that is, media people and others who study the Net rather than contribute to it. Among some journalists the standard modus operandi is to post questions for an article, then vanish without sharing anything with the Netfolks.
Happily, this is changing somewhat. In fact, you can find a few journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other major papers speaking up online about matters dear to them. Recently a reader flamed the Post for its Internet coverage (“what those idiots at the Post write isn’t worth minimum wage”). Alluding to software that can screen out messages from offensive people, reporter John Schwartz punched right back: “It’s bozo filter time.” He had been using online services for years, and here, it showed. The old stereotype, in which all members of the major media are clueless, just doesn’t fly any more. Not too long ago somebody shared a New York Times article—discussing some other people’s proposal for a national digital library—with hundreds of a members of a list devoted to law in cyberspace. He did not ask permission from the Times. A pithy reference to copyright law then emanated from none other than Peter Lewis, who had written the article and was a regular on the list.
So how are Netfolks treating Lewis nowadays? He e-mailed back an answer in prose worthy of a discussion group on the Internet itself:
It took me a while to get used to being flamed by pencil-dicked geeks who hide behind their terminals, saying things I’m sure they’d never dream of saying to my face. But now I’ve become something of a connoisseur of flamage, and while I regret that it is widespread on the Net, I regret more that the quality of flaming is almost uniformly weak. I now savor good flames and ignore the rest. On the other hand, it took me almost as long to get used to having instant feedback, often pointed and critical and right-on, to my writing. While there is a danger of a “chilling effect” from flamage, perhaps subtly influencing reporters to back off a subject in anticipation of a flood of “Dear Clueless” letters, I think the overall benefit of instant and widespread reader feedback is a Good Thing. Perhaps all rookie reporters should be required to write a Net story just to let them know that they do not write in a vacuum, whether their beat is the Internet or the police station or sports.
Like the police beat, the Internet comes with its set of rules—as my experience with the CIA alum vividly showed. Some on the Net attach a statement to every post saying it’s copyrighted. Others just worry that the wrong set of people may read and quote their more outspoken messages. Lewis considers list and newsgroup posts to be public: “My mother once advised me, long before she knew I would be a journalist, ‘Never put anything on paper that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times.’”
Still, Lewis normally catches up with the writers of posts he plans to quote. “However, the reason has more to do with verification than with netiquette. In cyberland as well as in the real world, as you know, the fact that someone’s name and address appear in a letter does not guarantee the identity of the writer.” Lewis reminded me that “half a century ago some newspapers forbade reporters from quoting sources contacted by telephone on the same rationale: How do you really know that was Mr. Doe on the phone if you didn’t see him? In cyberville, not only can we not see our sources, but neither can we hear them.” And then a few sentences later came the electronic signature, “Pete (at least, you think it’s Pete) Lewis.”[[4.8]]
Other challenges exist online. When reporters use e-mail for interviews, they take away the element of surprise—often the surest route to the best answer. “Also,” says Jordan Green, a Canadian freelancer who relies heavily on e-mail, “there is no body language or voice intonation in e-mail. We do have our various symbols to >>>highlight<<< and _emphasize_ WORDS and feelings :-) but there is far more which cannot be picked up.”