Orwell On Line

It was like a scene from George Orwell's 1984. One quiet Monday night, two Ithaca policemen knocked at 21-year-old Cornell student Matt Mihaly's door. Refusing to show him an arrest warrant, they handcuffed him, shoved him into the back of a squad car and incarcerated him in the mental ward of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital for two days. While he was there, they extracted blood against his will, placed him in psychotherapy and released him only on the condition that he pay the hospital's bill of several thousand dollars.

His unspeakable crime? Posting a suicide note--in jest--on the Internet.

For those of us who have some experience navigating the Information Superhighway--otherwise known as cyberspace or whatever other techno-sounding media moniker you like--this little stunt doesn't sound all that unusual. With thousands of newsgroups (electronic, public bulletin boards) covering every topic from alt.society anarchy to alt.sex.fetish, a suicide note sounds pretty uncreative.

What is creative is Cornell's fascist response and its underlying inability to adapt effectively to a technology leaping faster and faster into the homes of people everywhere. This is a problem many schools--including Harvard--have not yet begun to address.

The central issues are the accountability of newsgroup users and the legitimacy of the Internet as a forum for discussion. While most corporations recognize that e-mail authors should be held accountable for their transmissions (Harvard's reprimand of "e-mail stalkers" is an example), there is less agreement on the level of accountability for newsgroup users.

Newsgroups are network abstractions where participants--many of them with untraceable accounts and pseudonyms--post messages for the public to read. Because of this high level of anonymity (for many users, read: adventure), some newsgroups become harmless forums where shy housewives may live out their fantasies, college kids can plan communist revolutions and strangers are introduced to one another. The cyberspace becomes a surreal, virtual world where characters exist only by the words their creators choose to write. And nothing more.

If characters in a novel commit suicide, make death threats or claim that the world will end tomorrow, their authors aren't punished. The storylines may be distasteful, but they aren't criminal. If all newsgroup users were held accountable for their words, millions of people all over the world would be arrested, convicted and shot by their governments.

The issue of legitimacy follows from newsgroups' lack of accountability. People subscribe anonymously to newsgroups and write whatever they please with impunity, robbing them of any legitimate pretense. The type of noncritical topics that newsgroups explore (soc.culture.zsa.zsa.gabor) hardly merit attention from disinterested parties. Newsgroups are as legitimate as street corners where crazies and drunks trumpet their causes.'

Groups which allow their members full access to the Internet find it difficult to separate their paternalistic itch to protect and punish those who would enter cyberspace from the reality that newsgroups are nothing more than the latest interactive entertainment. Mihaly told Rolling Stone. "I never even considered that anything I wrote would have any repercussions in the real world."

He got it right; the Internet is not the real world. The Cornell suicide-watch should have spent a bit more time around those two famous Ithaca gorges, instead of monitoring thousands of lame-duck messages on the network.

Patrick S. Chung's column appears on alternate Saturdays.