It's interesting to watch how my writing style has developed on internet discussion boards over the past few years. I've developed a rhythm which helps me to attract other people to talk with, and allows me to have long in depth conversations with them.

The first thing, of course, that one has to recognize - is that different sites have different levels of foot traffic coming by. I love websites where you can have an in depth conversation over the course of a few hours of posting back and forth with people. At most discussion boards it takes weeks or even months to complete a single conversation. That's really unworkable, I think.

I'm thinking about starting a discussion board of my own. And I'm calling it a "mail and reader" - because it will no doubt be more like that - a place for intellectuals to exchange ideas back and forth, sporadically as if by mail; and of course other folks who walk by, can read the conversations. I'm still not sure I want to take the responsibilities of moderating a forum onto my shoulders. But I have yet to find an ideal place to chat with folks on the net. There's always a drawback that makes it hard. And I've been vigorously participating on web discussion boards for several years now. It'd be nice to have my own site, where I can set the parameters. Ideally, I think internet discussion boards ought to be moderated by the participants themselves - wikipedia style. But no one has created that kind of software yet. If no one else jumps on it over the next couple of years, I might have to create it myself.

The second thing that's important, is that it's good to challenge people. Challenge the mainstream opinion on an issue. Question the background behind someone's attitude, if you find it disagreeable. If you fish for responses in this way, you'll have more and faster paced conversations and you will have more opportunity to write. You'll get a lot more airtime for your opinions on a board, if you seek to correct diagreeable people. And it is a lot like the boat fishing which my family used to do on the lake on which our cabin was. We used to troll for fish. And one basically did nothing - sitting there for tens of minutes or even hours - waiting for a fish to take the bait on the line. You have to interject ideas into lots of different conversations, and then have a system (possibly with bookmarks) where you go through and check all your lines to see if you have a response anywhere. "Trolling" is a fascinating concept on the internet. Please don't giggle too much as you trip over eachother to comment, pointing out the similarities between my fishing allusion, and what folks on the internet decry as being odious.

There's something nice about anonymity on the internet, too. Since the dawn of literature, there have been certain topics which are taboo or controversial, which can be best discussed anonymously. These things can get people really riled up and upset. But, it's important for social progress that we talk about these issues completely and thoroughly, and allow others to put forth new models and outside-the-box appraisals about these things. Throughout even the past few hundred years of Western history there have been big public controversies over child labor, slavery, whether the earth was flat, the substances sold as food before the FDA was created (in the usa), homosexuality, communism, death. And in each of these cases, in order for the issue to be resolved, and healthy public policies to be put in place, you had to have free and open discussion about the topics. The internet has made this much easier recently, because of its tradition of anonymous public speech.

It's important to have a passion about the topic you're discussing. Although, when writing in a fit of passion, it is sometimes important to sit and look at what you're about to post, to see whether it needs to be rewritten so that it has the impact and the influence on the discussion that you intend it to have.

The most important thing I have found, is that one needs to have sincere caring about the other people in the discussion... and about the issue being discussed. If you are going to correct a troublemaker... you need to be working on behalf of her or his personal interests. And throughout the course of your conversation with that person, she needs to be able to see that (although many times she will not admit it).

The basic rhythm I've found in my in depth discussions is that deep conversations on the net is kind of like playing tennis (although in slow motion). You are sending the ball back and forth over the net. When the ball is in your court, you have the opportunity to reframe the discussion - to offer a different perspective on the issue (and optionally, you can also deconstruct your partner's motivations or try to discern the background which makes her or him write in that way). The person who can contextualize the issue the most thoroughly and most convincingly will win the debate.

"Trolling" is a fascinating concept on the internet. It's an odd amalgamation of many different concepts. The indignance people have when they call someone a troll - which means among other things "an odious person" - is, I think, mostly because of a defense mechanism people are experiencing on the internet. In the late 1990s... there came to be a serious problem on the internet of all kinds of untruisms being bandied about along with all kinds of insane types of blogging. Internet users have become very zealous about the judging the veracity of those things which they read. In this way an exposure to more information makes people better critical thinkers. This is why I am very glad of this information age, and the types of initiatives you see at wikipedia. People who have a centralized media - like north america had in the 1900s - become very sheeplike - "sheeple" is the cuss word that is bandied about on the internet these days. In other words, people tend to start adopting an ethic of reasoning according to consensus. Folks in the usa, for instance, look around and see whatever most people seem to believe, and adopt that worldview. (Yes, people are pretty dumb, here in the usa). And that is just not good for a society, overall. I think that such societies are putting themselves at risk for really big errors in judgement (such as electing president bush jr the 43rd for two terms). The internet therefore, is giving us a new generation of avid critical thinkers - folks who question everything, and who can find other people on the internet who also have seen these issues in a different light than their parents did.

But when you see folks yelling about "trolling" - there are other kinds of complex social dynamics wrapped up in that situation.

There are certain people who, in the late 1990s and in the first decade, were and are going about and making trouble and being rude on internet discussion forums and in blog comment threads. These people actively try to push people's buttons. They use heavy sarcasm in order to get a reaction from others. They can quickly destroy the health of a community which is based solely on words, if their antics aren't kept in check.

Also young budding intellectuals would sometimes tell others that they "troll" discussion forums. These people have very cool and outside-the-box ideas and models that they don't feel secure about yet. They just want to float these ideas and see if they can find others who might also have seen issues from this perspective. I think that these young men and women do a disservice to themselves when they describe themselves in this way. Their inductive reasoning is a valuable addition to a discussion, and does not cause problems at all. The only problem I've seen is when more mature adults want to harp on their spelling and grammar. One can see outbursts then, when the young woman or man can get very petulant because of personal insecurity. It's really ungracious for older adults to call youths' outside-the-box ideas "crazy." It's not a funny jest to poke fun at wordy young people in this way. The problem is, that it's like crushing a young flower under your foot. That person will invariably lose faith in all of her ideas, and go through a really dark time in her life. And then we as a society lose years and possibly decades of this person's service - time she would have otherwise used to benefit us.

Finally, the staid and prudish scientific community in the anglophone world has its hackles raised when too many people on the internet start questioning their research and collegiate ideas through inductive reasoning of their own. This is a serious front of contention on the internet in this first decade. There are a lot of holes in current scientific thought - where the practitioners have their nose so close into the research that they miss seeing the forest for the trees. And collegiate types are beginning to worry about their future careers, I believe, given that everybody can publish a blog page these days, and question anything which they'd like to.

Paul Otlet envisioned the internet in 1934, and drew up the concept for it decades before it was actually created.

The internet is sick.

Why is this so?

Well my notion is that the internet is full of altruists. People work their fingers to the bone on behalf of different causes and agendas. They do all they can to create good things to give to those who come to their websites, but there is no way to make an income from this work that they do. People write for websites such as Wikipedia or Newsvine. People put up videos on youtube, or they create music, and distribute it on peer to peer networks. They seek earnestly to add value to the world they live in. They seek to influence the world, and change things. And yet and still they find nothing but lint when they empty their pockets.

It's been interesting to compare the evolution of attitudes and agendas on the open internet, with the evolution of events at a virtual 3dworld where I like to chat with folks - SecondLife. SecondLife is a healthy place. There are lots of seedy sections, where the avatar motion is really slow, and there are endless streets of empty shopfronts, where people are trying to sell their wares. But there are also very intriguing social dynamics evolving. People are role playing, and designing strategy games, and making nice bungalows where they can invite their real world friends over for tea.

Now the key difference here I would like to point out, is that SecondLife was designed from the bottom up to encourage people to create things, and to buy and sell them. You are taught the skills you need to create these crafts and services, and then you are given the tools with which to start up a business. And having property in SecondLife for a storefront or for your own events is quite expensive. Ideally one should have a private island, and that costs $1000usd initially, and $300usd per month for as long as you hold onto the property. So just like in the real world, having a business requires a certain amount of overhead, which you have to pay each month. The upshot of all of this, is that people get inspired in SecondLife. SecondLife goods and services are not expensive, and there's always stuff available for free, which is given out by people who wish to promote themselves. And I'm sure that most entrepreneurs give up quickly, not having made more than a few dollars. However, the fact that there are at least some ways of pulling in an income which are obvious, means that even if people fail at first, they will remain in good spirits, and become innovative, and some will go on to carve themselves niches which others haven't thought of yet. The upshot of all of this, is that people have hope, and they can see the way forward for themselves.

So my proposal is that just like folks have created so many varieties of discussion board software and blog software in php, that they would also think about creating web software which makes it very easy for the creators of web content, whether it be text, or audio, or video, or whatever - to charge for those who use that content. Paypal has a micropayments system which could be easily plugged in as a back end to web software.

Now, there are those who are petulant and exclaim that everything on the net has to be free. And they might be indignant about this proposal. To address those people... let me say that I think that because of the nature of the computer and the internet, audio, video, text, and imagery will be copied freely and will be shared freely forever. There is no turning back the hands of the clock on the technology. Those who want to conduct business on the internet will have to adapt their strategies to incorporate the zeal of folks who want to get things for free. When Gutenberg's movable type printing press was introduced in the middle of the millenium, it changed the world - and many people were out of work, and many others found new niches for themselves; we're going through a similar revolution now. And looking at SecondLife - I think that even when folks are given the websoftware tools, most people will not be successful with starting a business selling ethereal digital downloads, or content. But they will retain hope and their dignity, and they will begin to see a way forward for themselves where they might succeed as entrepreneurs someday. The wonderful thing about the internet is that it has removed the need for capital for those who wish to start a business.

And from here, I think the social dynamic across the internet would change dramatically. It no longer will be a place of the hippy vision of free sharing and consumption. It will be a vibrant place, where if someone has an idea of some cool project they want to create, she or he will also have the ideas in mind of how to pay for that project. If people can figure out how to pay themselves for their work on the net, this will untie a lot of hands. No longer will the most prevalent internet occupation be coming home from work on a friday afternoon, and writing or reading a sloppy blog entry.

I now have the skills to create this kind of web software using tcl/tk and I have a vision in mind for how I will do it. The question is whether and when I will find the time to set my hand to the project. So I hope others will take this vision as their own as well.