Essay 2: The Early Internet

Under certain circumstances conversing on the Internet, one never truly knows who or what is on the other end of the text. The Internet is as vast as the real world itself, and is only getting larger and more complex over time. The amount of people “plugging in” to the web is quite mind-boggling. With more and more people, comes the chance to interact with interesting people through chat programs. Internet Relay Chat is no different from the real world; there are enemies and consequences, or friends and rewards, yet ultimately it depends on ones willingness to assimilate to see which path that is taken.

Internet Relay Chat, or better known as IRC for short, “came into being in 1988 by a Finnish student named Jarkko Oikarinen, allowing individuals to converse with one another in real time” (World Almanac, 2006). IRC allows people to talk to one another as if they were speaking in person. Although that seen as a plus it may also be seen as a minus, creating certain consequences and enemies that may hurt ones experience on IRC or the Internet in general. Specifically on the IRC network, GameSurge, an IRC network dedicated to gaming, fundamentally permits anyone to come on the network pending they follow the terms of service. The terms of service is a simple rulebook saying one will follow the rules and do no harm.

Anyone interested in any type of “gaming” seems to flock to the network, regardless of where in the world one lives. On the network and in their main channel, #GameSurge, users range in the hundreds. At one time the amount of people in the channel went to a staggering 350 people, and that is just in the one channel, on the network it could have been in the thousands. Yet, trying to identify the age or gender of any of the users is useless since each person is anonymous, and able to choose their own user name, or handle. If one was to look at the screen they would see a list filled with people, and the only logical thing one could do is make an assumption based upon their handles, yet this leaves to consequences on IRC, specially GameSurge. But because we are dealing with GameSurge, the average user age on the network can be ranged from as low as a freshman in high school to as high as a senior in college, and the network is mostly male. But one still should not make an assumption, simply because there are a handle of women on the network.

Even if there were a large population of woman on the network, one would still not be able to know. “There is no reliable way to find out whether the ostensible gender matches the real life one” (Danet, 1998). The only way to truly find out a person’s sexuality on the network would to ask each one and trust their answers. After all there is no oversight, so they could simply lie. With IRC, the users are mostly dealing with an honor system, making honor a very important thing to each and every user in the community. Like every rule, there happens to be exceptions, and some just do not feel that way. These users see no friends online, only people that can become their enemies and they get enjoyment out of such situations. There was one case where a user pretended to be a female. He used the handle, sexxysexyjill. Sometimes when users have forward and obvious nicks it is almost a give away that they are anything but what their handle says, but this is IRC and assumptions should be kept to a minimum. So “sexxysexyjill” attempted to reap havoc upon the channel by making everyone think that his sexuality was in fact a woman. Ironically, apparently this has been tried so many times that as soon as the user attempted anything the operator just muted the user so he could not chat and told him to play nice, resulting in him changing his name back to l4ndF4|3mer. Although Usenet, another form of Internet communication, is quite different from IRC, Kollock and Smith said it best when they speaking about those who act out against the network. “Don’t bother flaming them – attention is their reward. Just ignore them. They’ll get bored and go away” (Kollock and Smith, 1996). Once l4ndF4|3mer realized no one was buying into what he wanted to do he quietly left the channel.

Age is a big concern on the network due to maturity levels not being that high, and the Internet already being a collection of anything and everything, some users just lack self control in key situations. For instance, there was a user, cyberdeath, talking to another user, howmydictate, about the latest computer hardware and somewhere along the line howmydictate just lost interest in the conversation and only wanted laughs from the channel. So he starts saying offensive words, as well as pop culture references, mainly Borat, and low and behold he does not realize that cyberdeath is an operator, and moderator of the channel and is removed from the network for violating the networks terms of service. Later howmydictate returned with a botnet, bunch of zombie users, which simply spammed the channel until operators like cyberdeath channel the channel to moderated mode.

Right then and there one can see that howmydictate was attempting to take revenge on cyberdeath and the network for being removed from the channel and try and regain his honor in some why by disobeying the terms of service. Some users just live in a do or do not reality where trying to reach a middle ground and bring something beneficial to the network happen to be not an option. But there is good in some individuals and they end up allowing the community to grow, why else would there be thousands of people joining together on an IRC network, if there was not something worthwhile there?

In closing IRC, like anything depends entirely on the user. One might find a friend. One might find an enemy. Whatever it is that one does end up finding, hopefully it is they benefiting from the network while bringing something as well.


Works Cited:

GameSurge Overview (http://gamesurge.net/cms/GameSurge_Overview/).
GameSurge Terms of Service (http://gamesurge.net/tos/).

World Almanac & Book of Facts (anv ed.). (2006). New York, NY: World Almanac Books.

Danet, Brenda. (1998). text as mask: Gender, play, and performance on the Internet. In Steven G. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 129-158). Thousand Oaks, NJ: Sage.

Kollock, Peter & Smith, Marc. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In Susan C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communications: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 109-128). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.