Internet Coverage Displays Ignorance

I was infuriated by the recent article regarding pornography on the Internet ("Internet Pornography on Rise; University Lacking Policy," news story Sep. 29, 1994).

The Crimson passed up a chance to write a very interesting article on why the Office of Information Technology was looking through a student's computer files in the first place, and chose instead to write a sensationalist story about an alleged flood of pornography on the Internet. This might be racy stuff to people who are unfamiliar with the Internet, but it is not news. This stuff has been there for years, and it will probably still be there for years.

I see a disturbing trend in the media's coverage of the Internet. Far too many publications talk about the "seedy side" of the Internet, and not about its genuine research benefits. And must publications, including your own, make blatant factual errors in discussing these issues.

If you consider all the traffic on the Internet each month, about 11 percent is used by the news groups. Of this, about 20.6 percent is used on actual images or the discussion of sexually explicit material. Bear in mind, however, that we're still only talking about traffic in terms of actual megabytes. In real terms, only 18,000 actual articles related to pornographic images or sexually explicit messages were posted last month. That is less than one percent of all messages. The reason so much traffic is used by so few messages is that pictures are a lot bigger than text.

News groups, it is true, are not the only medium by which one can access pornography, but they are the most popular. There is a lot of phone sex-type conversation on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), but IRC only accounts for 1.417 percent of the traffic ever the Internet.

I still don't see why this is news, however. Pornography is available at Video Pros, at Out-of-Town News, through the mail and on CD-ROM. Is it any surprise that it is also available over the Internet? Every new technology has at some point or other been used as a medium for sexually explicit materials.

What I find newsworthy about the Internet is the quiet revolution that has slowly taken place between researchers and the publishers of expensive research journals. It used to be that journal articles were only available by mail, directly from researchers or in libraries.

Now, however, articles are increasingly available over the Internet, completely changing the way many professors and students do research. Consider: I have not had to visit a library for the past three months while researching my thesis. Whenever I come across a reference to a paper I would like to read. I just use Mosaic, a tool that accesses the World Wide Web, to look it up. A single click brings it home to say hard-drive, where I simply print it out.

I urge The Crimson to stop splashing its ignorance of computer-related matters across the front page of the paper, and to begin treating the Internet as a legitimate journalistic beat. James S. Gwertzman '95