Outrage On The Internet

Poor Daniel A. Simon '99. He is simply a spirited a-capella singer who thought he'd volunteer to advertise for last night's Opportunes-Callbacks concert by sending an e-mail message to a lot of people. The next thing he knows, people are scrawling "Immoral E-Mail Freak" on his Canaday door, and the front page of this newspaper describes the ensuing fallout as an "outrage."

Innocent publicity isn't what it used to be. There is talk of Ad Board action; Franklin Steen, the Director of Computer Services, categorically waves FAS policy around like a baseball bat; the Chair of the FAS Committee on Information Technology predicts apocalyptic results: that an advertisement "can bring the system to its knees"!

Dan has a right to send e-mail to whoever he pleases but only insofar as he does not impose an undue cost on others. Like him, I cannot help but draw the same analogy that the Handbook for Students draws in its section on "Electronic Communication." There, right before the caution that "messages... should not be sent as chain letters or 'broadcast' indiscriminately to large numbers of individuals," the Handbook gives e-mail use the same status as other forms of communication: "The same standards of behavior, however, are expected in the use of electronic mail as in the use of telephones and written and oral communication."

Dan is allowed to print flyers and have the Crimson circulation department door-drop them to every room on campus. Alternately, Dan might have created a gigantic list of e-mail addresses, and sent out a mass e-mailing. The recipients of both versions of the message would have either read it or ignored it, and then perhaps thrown it away or deleted it.

In both cases, the sender has expended a measure of effort to convey his message, and in both cases, recipients have been compelled to expend some effort acknowledging and disposing of the message. In daily life, we accept this principle: junk mail sometimes annoys us, but it is not illegal. We can take measures to prevent it, but its receipt usually imposes no cost other than time.

E-mail in this era is a slightly different matter. There is no individual cost to Dan for sending a mass e-mailing, but when a few hundred bytes of data are duplicated more than 6,000 times and flooded into an e-mail server, other messages travelling through the same server are delayed; the entire network suffers. And it is here, in the present state of technology, that most objections to Dan's action lie. His mass-mailing is supposed to have imposed a cost on all of us in the form of lessened network speed. Aside from the ridiculous graffiti on Dan's door claiming his action to be "immoral", all objections seem to lie in practical grounds.

What really scares people jumping to lay blame on this first-year is the precedent he may set. If everyone thought they'd send messages to their 6,000 closest friends at once, the system would surely collapse. The framing of this nonevent as an "outrage" is meant to deter others from exercising similar capabilities. The threats of Ad Board action, the juvenile graffiti, the pontifications of administrators at the various Harvard computer committees are all out of proportion to the actual offense. They're putting on a show to ward off potential violators.

What all this fuss betrays is a terrible fear on the part of those who would regulate an increasingly intangible entity. There is nothing stopping any one of us from cutting and pasting a few thousand e-mail addresses into our e-mail programs and sending messages off. No one has the resources to monitor potential violations of mass e-mailings. There is much legal ambiguity in FAS policy, especially in what "indiscriminately" means (after all, the Opportunes' message was not 'indiscriminate' so far as I can tell: it was targeted at a very specific audience of potential concert-goers).

In short, our own inability scares us. In a few years, when computer capabilities no longer present obstacles to handling mass e-mailings, I wonder how many people will express such outrage or call for Ad Board action or scrawl stupid things on doors. By then, mass e-mailings will be just another daily nuisance of life. And no one will pin the blame on someone like Daniel Simon.

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