The Net and Red Dwarf

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Title:	The Net and Red Dwarf
Creator:	David Fraser
Date(s):	1994
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Red Dwarf
Topic:
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The Net and Red Dwarf is an essay by David Fraser.

It was published in Better Than Life #13.

The topic is Red Dwarf fans and Usenet, specifically alt.tv.red-dwarf.

The essay is accompanied by some sample posts, with, CMA's (the editor of "Better Than Life") comments: "And in case you think it sounds good, here's a snippet taken from the net and caged first on a 3" disc, then on these very pages (it's been shrunk and rearranged as space is limited, but it's still intact in content terms.)"

From the Essay

Imagine you’ve just walked into a room. A large room. No, make that a VERY large room. It's full of people. Most of them you'll never notice, as they are sitting quietly, listening but not saying anything. The rest of the people, though, are talking. VERY loudly. So loudly that everyone else in the room can hear them. And yet... you can hear what each person is saying clearly, and you can reply to each question they make, comment they state, opinion they pontificate, and you know that you will be heard just as clearly...

Sounds like some kind of weird dream, right? Wrong. It's a Usenet Newsgroup.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t don an A.R. helmet and go walking through a room in cyberspace. You sit at your computer, reading messages one by one, sometimes replying to them, sometimes not (depending on your mood, the time of day, and how big a flame-bait the newbie is). The overall effect, though, is very much like that room in cyberspace. The people whose messages you are reading could live just next door... or halfway around the world. There’s no way to tell. Likewise, there’s no way to know (unless they specifically tell you) how old they are, what sex they are, how good they are in bed... as one correspondent on alt.fan.pratchett said recently: "On the net, no-one knows you are an orang-utang!"

There are quite literally thousands of these newsgroups, covering every conceivable subject from Star Trek (nearly 10 newsgroups now, including one for kinky Star Trek sexual fantasies) to obscure ten-year-old computers that no-one ever buys anymore, but are still being used for important stuff, somewhere. Naturally, there is a Red Dwarf newsgroup.

What can I say about alt.tv.red-dwarf? It's like Post Pod . VERY like Post Pod. Imagine Post Pod with no CMA . No sane voice of reason deciding what gets published and what doesn't, replying to articles that need replying to and simply letting us react the rest. A Post Pod where you could reply direct to the twat-who-said-this-about-the-ending-to-Out-Of-Time-and-is-dearly-wrong-In-My-Humble-Opinion. Are you nervous, yet? Right. The DAILY throughput of alt.tv.red-dwarf is about the size of one issue's (3 months worth of) Post Pod.

You get newbies (new net users) who want to know where all the good stuff is. You get not-so-newbies, who’ve had a chance to trunk about things, and get settled in, and now want to tell the world their brill theory as to how Lister had his appendix out twice, where ’’Gordon Bennett” came from, wny the Polymorph could touch Rimmer in Polymorph, what REALLY happened in Out Of Time, and so on. Occasionally, you get sensible people who try to put the answers to these and otner Frequently Asked Questions in a list so’s everybody can see them. Does it help? Does it monkeys.

Of course, it’s not all bad. We get a lot of news flowing through alt.tv.red-dwarf. Real news (and rumours toot), about out favourite programme, and about events related to it. Last year, for example, somebody posted a report about a Red Dwarf convention that was the equal of anything seen in this mag. We also get a lot of fanfic in the newsgroup - a dozen or so stories in the last year, and more being written even as I speak. And # somewhere amongst the direct social interaction, the cut and' thrust of debate, the trying to keep newbies informed and the rest of us sane... it’s fun. I shudder to think what it’ll be like once the rest of you lot get computers, though...