I went to the U-2 concert the other night--it was the second time I had seen the group live. The first time was more than 10 years ago in Washington DC's Ontario Theatre with about 500 other people. This time the crowd is 50-thousand. Call it selling out, call it success, or inevitable or even desirable, it still leaves a strange nostalgia for the days when being a fan of alternative music put you in a special club. :2O

This is going to sound like sour grapes to some of you, but I really miss the days when only a few of us were online. Back in 1993 Apple's eWorld was a nice little place to visit, America Online Users didn't get spammed every day, and the rules of the road--called netiquette--were observed. To some internet veterans even the early 90s were a time of longing for the days when the net was a strictly non-commercial venture. Yeah, in those days the people we called the newbies were small in number. 1:00

Its hard to say exacty when it all changed. Like the success of U2, the loss of the net's innocence cannot be traced to one source. To be sure, one of the immediate causes was America Online's silly decision to give its users access to the net without giving them any instructions on how to act once they got there. Countless AOL neophytes found themselves flamed -- or yelled at -- in the online discussion groups. 1:20

Now you may be waiting for me to make some elitist call for a return to the Good Old Days, but that's not the point here. For these newbies only *enhanced* our online community and after all, we were all clueless once. I would however, like to see a return of good manners and a respect for netiquette -- for along with the new folks came the soul-less hustlers who run junk eMail lists and who sell domain names for top dollar.

If I long for anything it is the days when online folks used the medium to its advantage--people who helped the net grow because it was *supposed* to grow, not because they saw big dollar signs. The people who are abusing cyberspace are the same kind of people who have trivialized television news, sold off our major sporting arenas and events, and cannot see beyond short term profits. 2:00

I realize this is terribly idealistic--that the internet could be driven by the curiosity of people and not their greed. Who can blame these folks though, when our elected leaders place more emphasis on electronic commerce than fostering electronic communities. The net is not one big credit card machine and we're not all online simply to buy whatever junk is being sold. 2:30