"Keeping up with the Techno-Joneses"

"Online Focus" - The Big Idea - May/June 1995
by Bayard Saunders

"Think outside of the box" is the creative mantra. But what happens when you don't know what the box is? Creativity wants discipline. The most imaginative thinking occurs within the most severe limitations, so creative for online virtual reality is more difficult than creative for actual reality, because a static, clearly-defined discipline is hard to come by in the current "wild west" of the dynamic online environment.

Every step forward in technology poses new challenges and new opportunities as human beings integrate the "improvements" into the processes of online communications. So if you are creating for online, or using online resources to help you in your creative process, how do you keep up?

Understanding the history and current capabilities of online systems is the first step in recognizing the limitations and exploring the outer edges of that which is possible online. I say that with the caveat that between the time I am writing this and the time you are reading this, new developments, like VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) which turns Internet World Wide Web pages into a 3D virtual reality landscape, may already be making some of my observations obsolete.

At this writing, Prodigy and CompuServe have provided full access to the Internet for their users, but have not provided Internet users free reciprocal access to their proprietary content. However, what is possible to do on the commercial online services (Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, etc.) is possible on the Internet, and vice-versa, for the most part, as they all have common ancestry in technological development.

With "Email," you can send and receive private text messages and data files to one person or many people at the same time. Like the real-world postal system, this provides for everything from intimate communications, to junk mail, and of course, bills. It works the same way on all systems, but CompuServe is the only one which charges extra fees or postage for Email.

Commercial services bulletin or message boards and Internet "Usenet" newsgroups allow you to read and post messages on virtual bulletin boards which are divided into thousands of topic areas of special interest. This very public forum provides all the advantages and disadvantages of the bulletin boards or kiosks or classified ads you have known. Only on the Internet, "Listservs" are the same thing as "Usenet," except each posting is automatically delivered to your Email, as if every classified ad placed in a newspaper of your special interest category were copied and mailed to your home. Some people find this very convenient, until they discover their computer mailbox filled with the thousands of Email messages which can be generated daily by this process.

On the Internet, "Gopher" was invented at the University of Minnesota to allow people who don't know how to navigate using UNIX commands on large mainframe computer systems to use simple text menus to search for information in university databases on those computers. While this invention made the data accessible to more people, it took "Veronica," a program that searches Gopher menus and files for keywords and phrases, to make the system practical for those who didn't want to spend their lives paging through menus. On the commercial services, "GO" and "Jump" and "Keyword" programs provide essentially the same function.

"FTP," or File Transfer Protocol, was the necessity behind the initial packet-switching architecture of the Internet, and from its humble beginnings of transferring or copying files from one computer to another, it has evolved into the concept of a virtual library of data files and software program files, allowing Internet users to transfer files from that library to their own computer. "Archie," like Veronica, was invented to allow people to search for files using keywords and phrases. All of the commercial services have provided this capability, with, of course, more limited selections in their libraries.

"IRC," or Internet Relay Chat, or "Chat Rooms" or "Forums" on the commercial services, are virtual meeting places, where a limited number of users may chat with each other or the whole group, or slip each other private notes, or just listen-in on other people's conversations. It is very much like going to a Hollywood cocktail party without having to kiss anyone on the cheek. According to Internet research studies and commercial services' accounting departments, it is the most popular function online today, where over sixty percent of the average user's time is spent.

Photographic images and sounds and even video files have been available on the commercial services and Internet since their inception; however, these had to be downloaded via FTP, a very time consuming and not very immediately satisfying experience. America Online was the first to offer fairly quick viewing of photos, and Prodigy quickly followed, but last year the Internet "World Wide Web" was introduced, which allowed pages of text and photos to be viewed using a "browser," a software program much like the Gopher, only with the addition of graphics and photos and audio and video.

So for the post-production, animation, music composition, audio and video professionals using the online environment in their work, and the creative community being charged now (or soon to be commissioned) to develop content for the this new medium, all of these functions combined are the current "box." Some of the more interesting experiments now involve direct-mail Email to self-selecting consumers, Chat Rooms/Forums with scheduled celebrity visits, Usenet newsgroups or bulletin boards disguised as Graffiti Walls, and machines like videocameras capturing images of unique places and posting them on World Wide Web pages.

Some of you may be familiar with this excellent example of providing useful information in a creative application: Videography magazine's sponsored Electronic Roundtable on CompuServe, a nonlinear, non-real-time group discussion in cyberspace. More to the point of creative design for the new medium is Hotwired, where they have done more than transfer magazine pages to the online environment. Hotwired is the best example of "translating" the content, look, and experiential excitement evoked by the printed magazine, Wired, using virtually all the interactivity and functions the online box offers.

So if you're online and want to keep up, be sure to check out the "What's New" area available on each of the commercial services, and on the Netscape Internet World Wide Web browser. Subscribe to the New-List Listserv, and/or review the new newsgroup titles offered each time you access Usenet. Send Archie and Veronica requests using your favorite keywords every month or so to find new resources for your work. And keep reading The Big Idea!

This month's online Email contest: Photography Online - Blessings and Curses! Send us an Email message telling about your best success or disaster with photography and any online service or the Internet. We'll print the best and worst, for your next prospect to read! Or send us feedback about this column - good or bad news, we can take it - and ask questions or tell us what you'd like to know more about online.

Fun with E-mail: 
	Listserv e-mail discussion of all video technologies: VIDEOTECH
	Send E-mail to: videotech-request@wsmr-simtel20.army.mil
	Subject: Subscribe
	Message: SUBSCRIBE VIDEOTECH (Your First Name) (Your Last Name)

	Listserv e-mail discussion of the visual arts: ARTCRIT
	Send E-mail to: listserv@vm1.yorku.ca
	Subject: Subscribe
	Message: SUBSCRIBE ARTCRIT (Your First Name) (Your Last Name)

Fun with Usenet:
	alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.graphics - Art created on computers
	alt.binaries.sounds.music - Distribution of encoded music files
	comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.music - Music on IBM(-like) PC Sound Cards 
	rec.audio.pro - Professional audio recording and studio engineering
	rec.music.compose - Creating musical and lyrical works
	rec.music.makers.marketplace - Buying & selling used music-making equipment
	rec.music.video - Discussion of music videos and music video software
	rec.video.production - Making professional quality video productions	

Fun with FTP:
To get Scott Yanoff's infamous "Internet Sevices List!"
	FTP (anonymous) csd4.csd.uwm.edu
	/pub/inet.services.txt

Fun with Gopher:
	gopher.tc.umn.edu - All the Gophers in the World list at University of Minnesota!
	gopher.marvel.loc.gov - Library of Congress Art Catalogs
	gopher.eff.org - Electronic Frontier Foundation , information about the Internet

Fun with World Wide Web:
Surf is up on these way-cool URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)!
	http://hyperreal.com -  EPSILON: The Ambient Music Information Archive
	http://plymouth.com - Plymouth Place Interactive Kiosk Online
	http://lion.ccit.arizona.edu/mlab/mlab-video.html - UA Media Lab Video Station
	http://www.alias.com/Product/Alias_PowerAnimator.html - Alias PowerAnimator	
	http://digiplanet.com/DP - Digital Planet
	ftp://tiger.cs.ucdavis.edu/HTML/ECS165B-Spring94/multi2.html - Multimedia	Info
	http://viswiz.gmd.de/DML/overview.html - GMD Digital Media Lab: Overview
	http://oeonline.com/~bayard - A humble journalist with great hotlinks
	http://rossroy.com - Ross Roy Communications new Internet Website
        http://mosaic.echonyc.com/~mvidal/Indi-Film+Video.html - The Independent Film and Video Makers Internet Resource Guide

To get on-line call:

• America Online - (800) 827-6364
• CompuServe - (800) 848-8199
• Prodigy - (800) 776-3449
• Delphi - (800) 695-4005
• Netcom - (800) 501-8649
• Greater Detroit Freenet - (810) 691-7077