Newsgroups

Talking for Talking's Sake

Through newsgroups, conversation among equals—which, in the case of classic mass media, like television, radio, and press, and even though fed by media contents, had been relegated to the off-line world—came into history for the first time and definitively, within the media.

When the Internet began, with Usenet and newsgroups, users therefore found themselves with conversation and interaction as key elements, much before Web 2.0, advertised as the longed-for advent of an interactivity that, in reality, made up the very center of Usenet for decades; much before forums and Weblogs began to populate the Internet. In contrast to what happens with many participative spaces, like the customary blogs or forums, in which subjects are “suggested” or imposed and participation consists of a debate on those imposed topics, newsgroups allow any member of the group to raise the subject of debate, one of the main conditions for real interactivity—not a substitute for it, in which the actor who decides the subject for debate necessarily calls the shots. The contents of newsgroups cover a wide spectrum, from superspecialization to amateurism, and the main part of all conversation is “talking for talking's sake.”

Newsgroups are organized hierarchically in categories such as com (subjects related to information science); misc (miscellaneous groups); rec (recreation); sci (science); soc (sociological subjects); alt (alternative subjects that do not fit into the other categories); and humanities and news, among others. Some newsgroups are moderated, which means that new entries or articles go through a filter or gatekeeper before being published and accessible on Usenet. The protocol used for reading and publishing news on Usenet is the network news transfer protocol (NTTP).

In contrast to the discourse on publicity and openness surrounding the Web lately (discourse that at times is not free from a certain degree of demagogy), and in contrast to the innate overexposure characteristic of social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, newsgroups have always been a form of communication reluctant to being in the spotlight; they are more intimate, more ceremonious, and more tribal. With its own jargon, “trolls,” imaginary culture, and even reductio ad Hitlerum (as a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one, known also as Godwin's Law), it is very probable that for many Usenet users, the bright shop window of Google Groups is not exactly the dream place to end up.

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