At 04:10 PM 8/14/95 -0700, you wrote:

Perhaps some of us should be here to keep things in perspective.

Thanks; it was an interesting panel. I missed the first half hour, since traffic was appalling :-), but got to the rest; maybe an hour of panel discussion and 15 minutes of organized q&a, then wine&cheese. Just about everybody was concerned about pornography on the net, and thought that the government had no clue what they were doing and shouldn't be regulating it; most thought that the whole issue was really a smokescreen for the government wanting to regulate the nets and especially interstate commerce ("Hmm, we tried scaring everybody about terrorists on the net, that fizzled, let's scare them about porn and their kids - that always works!"). About half the panel had kids between 4 and 15. Lots of concern about media concentration and how this is currently the only widely accessible medium for 1:N communications so it's a target. Some interesting discussions about changes in society and our relationships with other people that come from net-style communications and artificiality - Mark Slouka was mainly taking the side of "this is different and I'm not sure I like it, and the fact that people are desperately seeking community through this virtual stuff says our communities out in the real world are probably having some real crises", with interesting thought behind it. PGN brought in some RISKS stuff, including the how-rumors-spread dynamics; he also talked a bit about cryptography (he's on that national policy review), somewhat from the perspective of "it's an international problem and trying to do things within national borders is ineffective" - I'm not sure he's on our side here though he's at least clueful. Dan Gillmor had some good perspectives on objectivity in reporting - the news business knows it's not objective, and he's at least concerned with trying to be fair and balanced and as quick as possible about correcting mistakes, but then he edits the SJMerc business page so it's a lot clearer what "mistakes" are than in, say, political reporting.

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* George Baldwin, California State University, Monterey Bay George Baldwin is involved with the IndianNet project, putting things like Native American artwork on the Web, including for sale. He brought up some cultural perspectives - a lot of people have been viewing it, but Native Americans don't actually _buy_ much of it because they tend to view artwork as personal and want to know the artist and what it means to him/her, and the net doesn't do that very well. If you haven't heard of CSU Monterey Bay, it's opening RSN.

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* Bill Bauriedel,Stanford University He's on an inter-university study to address things like how to do on-line registration while preserving privacy (doesn't like export laws at all.) * Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News * Richard Gingras, Apple Manages E-World and some network things. * Peter Neumann, SRI * Craig Newmark, Digital Threads Used to wear plastic pocket protectors when he was younger :-) Consults to big companies that need clues. * Mark Slouka, University of California, San Diego One of the liberal arts types on the panel. Either he or George Baldwin was talking about college students learning creative writing on MUDs and MOOs. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

"The fat man rocks out Hinges fall off Heaven's door "Come on in," says Bill" Wavy Gravy's haiku for Jerry