Broad Band by Claire L. Evans

Author:Claire L. Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

“A woman started the business, half the hosts were women, so just my doing that alone gave everything a different feel the minute you logged in. They felt more comfortable.”

Banishment was reserved for only the worst offenders. There’s an entire chapter in Stacy’s book devoted to what Echoids called “the Fear”: that feeling of horror a truly objectionable person sows with their behavior online. Echo had a Nazi once, and its share of sexual harassers. Marisa Bowe remembers an episode in which a young guy—“who thought he was, like, really subversive”—posted about incest in every Echo conference. Stacy forbade ad hominem attacks, and since the incest posts weren’t directed at anyone in particular, they didn’t violate Echo rules. Marisa found them as upsetting as vandalism. “When the world that you’re in is made purely of speech,” posting offensive material just for the sake of it is “like you’re bombing the buildings.”

All of this should be familiar today. The Internet’s still got its share of Nazis, trolls, and stalkers. And a social network that folds seamlessly into everyday life feels like a natural idea. That’s what all our social networks do now: we invite our friends to parties on Facebook, and we show them what they’re missing through photo and video stories. We follow one another’s travel schedules, love lives, and pets on social media, moving with ease from real life to online life, blurring the boundaries between the two and often mistaking one for the other.

But Stacy understood early on just how important people are to the network; as Echo’s final authority, she nurtured discussion and enlisted Echoids to lead conversations in their fields of interest. These “hosts” had carte blanche to engineer the particular cultural atmospheres of their conferences. “Echo is Echo because of the hosts,” she wrote in 1998. “The relationships we have are formed by what we tell. Hosts get us to tell each other everything.” In order for Echo to thrive, Horn realized that it needed a core base of vocal, participatory users. Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier—a book about virtual communities that completely omits Echo, incidentally—documents this strategy at work across the network, from a BBS in France with paid “animateurs” culled from its most active users to The WELL hosts in his own backyard. “Hosts are the people,” he wrote, who “welcome newcomers, introduce people to one another, clean up after the guests, provoke discussion, and break up fights if necessary.”

We’re all hosts now, the comment fields below our Instagram and Facebook posts our own personal conferences. But the more formal convention continues as well: Reddit, the so-called “front page of the Internet,” is a glorified bulletin board system, and each subreddit—which Echoids would call a conference—has its moderators, who make editorial decisions and lead conversation. Communities like Facebook and Twitter have moderators, too, although the role is no longer practiced by deputized users. Instead, paid employees, working in obscurity, often abroad, manually remove offensive content and respond to claims of abuse and harassment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.