Retorts

Net Congestion

Your December editorial refers to the "global village" of electronic networks. Judging by Usenet statistics I recently saw, it will soon be a matter of "global city". Between 1989 and 1993, newsgroup traffic increased by the best part of an order of magnitude.

There are problems with this. It won't be long before telephone lines will no longer have the bandwidth to support a full Usenet/Internet feed, thus significantly increasing the expense and making it likely that one's local site doesn't carry everything.

Another problem is that cities are louder than villages. As the population grows, it becomes ever more necessary to screen out extraneous noise. Where it was once possible to read the entirety of a number of newsgroups, one now has to read selected threads in a smaller number, balancing the risk of missing out on something against the time it takes to check everything.

There are a number of brute force approaches that can help. News being spread between a greater number of more specialised newsgroups can assist one's focus. Kill files that automatically junk postings from certain people or about certain topics help filter out previously-identified noise. What would really help is an AI with well-developed nonsense detectors.

Thus we run a very real risk of finding that although the global city has all sorts of wise and knowledgeable inhabitants, we can't make our way through the traffic jams, hawkers and street evangelists to get to them.

P. Dalton, Christchurch