Echo - something to consider? (look under the hood first)

[Kurt Cockrum]

Reference: <199801180138.RAA21660 at accessone.com>

Thanks, Steve, for giving me something to chaw on this morning...made
my day! :) :)

>From Steve's forwarding:
>Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 
>[...]

Danger Will Robinson!

>[...]
>Echo - lauded by the New York Times as "a cultural icon of the online
        ^^^^^^        ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^
>community" - is where journalists, writers, and actors mix easily
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^
>with teachers, lawyers, priests, and students.

Not to mention celebrities...
"TODAY in Salon #14, all the way from exotic Lake Tahoe, Cher Bono
reminisces ON-LINE about Sonny and the ongoing tragedy of unregulated
trees...hit `Go Cher' to join!!!" [ Thanks, Geov Parrish for the tree
bit! ]

>                                               It's where raging
>arguments over political and literary issues meld with intense
>psychological discussions.

yeah, yeah, yeah...I wonder if there are any "raging arguments" about
the detrimental effect that the self-reflexive activity of journalists
and media have on the rest of society...

>"Echo is a mixture of the corner bar, the debating society, and the
>hottest club in town," says Echo Communications Group president Stacy
                             ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^
>Horn, who founded Echo six years ago. 

>"We've attracted writers from the country's top newspapers and
                                             ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^
>magazines, big-name and unsigned musicians, well-known new media
 ^^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^^^^                         ^^^^^^^^^^
>artists, the curious and the disenfranchised. It's really as big and
>diverse as New York itself," Horn says. 
>[...]

Oh, gimme a break...
Thank goodness SCN doesn't have any celebrities aboard!
(if there are, they are mercifully keeping their mouths shut;
kudos to them if this is true.  But, celebs, don't blow your
cover by privately e-mailing *me* about it; like you, I don't
want to be bugged, nor do I wish to burdened with secrets... :)

>Echo is composed of over sixty conferences, such as Culture, Angst,
>Music, and the House of Thought. [...]
>[...]                                            Conversations are
>articulate and free-wheeling. 

bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

>Over 40% of the 3,500 people on Echo are women - significantly more
>than on other online systems. Activity on Echo is brisk, with
>hundreds and hundreds of new responses posted each day. Reasonable
>rates allow users to support a habit that can easily occupy an hour
>or more each day,

unlike drugs, which are not only expensive and illegal, but take more
time trying to get...and in this hard-pressed society, time is something
in short supply...so what do smart shoppers do?? :) :)  hee, hee

>                  and a staff of seven maintains the system and
>answers questions online and over the phone. For users eager to
>explore cyberspace, Echo offers full Internet access at a discounted
>rate to members of the conferencing system.
>[...]

In other words, a perfectly ordinary, vanilla ISP...

>Horn holds a master's degree in telecommunications from New York
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she now
>teaches a course on virtual culture. 

where she teaches her students how to design virtual clothing for
the Emperor, how to conceal brutal realities in a virtual cloak of
well-spun words, and other journalistic tricks...

>[...]
>Electronic communities are proof that computers are no longer
>synonymous with anti-social behavior.

Whenever I see a phrase like that, I'm reminded that journalists
in general are as clueless and/or cynical as ever. The perception that
computers are "synonymous with anti-social behavior" was media-generated,
and nobody but a journalist would be dumb enough to believe that in the
first place.  For a trade that seems to spend about 75% of their time
talking about themselves and the ripple-type effects of their societal
presence, this is an astonishing lack of self-awareness.
How can a collectivity be so self-servingly ingenous?  For me, this is
a continuing source of amazement.

>                                      Once, a user sat in seclusion
>with his computer-it was just him and the screen, alone

...in blessed solitude, getting some work done...
and then came along another guy with a clipboard, and, poof, that all
magically went away... and now there are zillions of clueless journalists
online, of all sexes and genders, that can breathlessly reinterpret
everything they see to fit their {mis,pre}conceptions, and as a side-effect,
help to maintain the old stereotypes as key parts of the journalistic
toolbox...the only one missing is "clueless journalist" itself.

>                                                        Now we know
>our modems can take us places where there are other people, where we
>can swap stories ask for advice, connect. The machines that we once
>thought would alienate us are helping to reacquaint us with each
>other.

duh *slap-on-the-forehead* hey, I never thought of that!  wow!

Why blame the poor innocent *machines*??  Journalists *using*
machines do it to perfection, just as they did back when everything
was done by hand!  In a literal sense, Stacy Horn, being a journalist
herself, part of the trade that continually *re-invents* the notion of
computer-mediated alienation, now touts her operation as the means of
"reacquainting us with each other", totally ignoring the existence of
hundreds of positively ancient on-line communities that have silently
(at least as best they could, given that journalists exist in the first
place) done all that years ago.

...and now she comes along, in a puff-piece she might have written
herself (a real hands-on gal), as a shameless self-promotional effort
(can you say, "unpaid advertisement"?), and reinvents the entire notion
of "virtual salon"!  The utter gall!  And she gets paid for teaching
this to her students!

Now, in all seriousness, ignoring for the moment, all my rock-throwing,
go back and re-read that PR puff-piece *critically*, and ask youself,
what does Echo do that isn't *already* *being* done by us and hundreds
of other on-line communities all over the country, and reflect on the
seductive power of words to blind us to already-existing realities,
and incidentally casting them in a poor light by design.

Just when you thought you had finished washing yourself, so to speak,
getting yourself all spiffy-clean, somebody comes along and tells you that
despite your best efforts, that your armpits or crotch *still* stink,
and by implication, you are a subhuman antisocial wretch unless you
buy into this "new" solution.  Where have we seen this pattern before??

What is really new in the story about Echo??
If I were a professor lecturing about the evils of uncritical
journalism-gone-bad, I'd clip this one for my case-book.

SCN workers, *don't* buy into this crap!!  You are doing way better
than Horn is telling you.

>       Virtual communities take us beyond the World Wide Web, beyond
>the latest "killer app," to a world where people furiously type in
                                                  ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^
>their fears, their frustrations, their life stories and dreams.
       ^^^^^        ^^^^^^^^^^^^

uhhh...like me??

Don't get me going about the "killer app" I'd like to see...
I might get in *real* trouble... :) :)
...especially if a journalist who doesn't know what smileys mean
stumbles across this screed... :( :(

...and just in case a journalist is reading this in their uncritical
fashion, I offer this CLUE: this is *not* an attack on Steve Hoffman :) ...
--kurt
 Do I hate journalists? do bears violate the CDA in the woods?
 Actually I don't hate them, I just dislike them intensely, and have
 practically no respect for them, because they are the catalysts
 that cause things to nightmarishly self-mutate into their opposites...
 and H. L. Mencken, spinning at about 10000 RPM, would doubtless agree :)
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