The FINGER controversy

he FINGER controversy, a debate over privacy on the Net, occurred in early 1979 and involved some of the worst flaming in the MsgGroup's experience. The fight was over the introduction, at Carnegie-Mellon University, of an electronic widget that allowed users to peek into the on-line habits of other users on the Net. The FINGER command had been created in the early 1970s by a computer scientist named Les Earnest at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "People generally worked long hours there, often with unpredictable schedules," Earnest said. "When you wanted to meet with some group, it was important to know who was there and when the others would likely reappear. It also was important to be able to locate potential volleyball players when you wanted to play, Chinese food freaks when you wanted to eat, and antisocial computer users when it appeared that something strange was happening on the system." FINGER didn't allow you to read someone else's messages, but you could tell the date and time of the person's last log-on and when he or she had last read mail. Some people had a problem with that.

In an effort to respect privacy, Carnegie-Mellon's Ivor Durham changed the FINGER default setting; he added a couple of bits that could be turned on or off, so the information could be concealed unless a user chose to reveal it. Durham was flamed without mercy. He was called everything from spineless to socially irresponsible to a petty politician, and worse -- but not for protecting privacy. He was criticized for monkeying with the openness of the network.

The debate began as an internal dialogue at Carnegie-Mellon but was leaked out onto the ARPANET by Dave Farber of the University of California at Irvine, who wanted to see what would happen if he revealed it to the outer world. The ensuing flame-fest consumed more than 400 messages.

At the height of the FINGER debate, one person quit the MsgGroup in disgust over the flaming. The controversy ended inconclusively. But it taught users a lesson about the medium they were using. The speed of electronic mail promoted flaming, some said; anyone hot could shoot off a retort on the spot, and without the moderating factor of having to look the target in the eye.

Smile When You Call Me That

On April 12, 1979, a rank newcomer to the MsgGroup named Kevin MacKenzie anguished on-line about the "loss of meaning" in this electronic, textually bound medium. Unquestionably, e-mail allowed a spontaneous verbal exchange, but he was troubled by its inability to convey human gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice -- all of which come naturally in conversation and express a whole vocabulary of nuances in speech and thought, including irony and sarcasm. Perhaps, he said, we could extend the set of punctuation in e-mail messages. In order to indicate that a particular sentence is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, he proposed inserting a hyphen and parenthesis at the end of the sentence, thus: -)

MacKenzie confessed that the idea wasn't entirely his; it had been sparked by something he had read on a different subject in an old copy of Reader's Digest. About an hour later, he was flamed, or rather, singed. He was told his suggestion was "naive but not stupid." He was given a short lecture on Shakespeare's mastery of the language without auxiliary notation. "Those who will not learn to use this instrument well cannot be saved by an expanded alphabet," the flamer wrote. "They will only afflict us with expanded gibberish."

Hah, what did Shakespeare know? Emoticons and smileys, a whole family of odd little sideways mimes, popularized by hoi polloi no doubt, arose in the medium of e-mail and went forth into the iconography of our times. :-)

Copyright 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. From the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, to be published by Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission. (Spesial Thank you published by Simon & Schuster Inc)