The Importance of Being .edu

The Internet is supposed to be a great leveller: no-one knows, in an all-text environment, whether you're black or white, female or male, blind or sighted, whatever. But there is one giveaway: your electronic address. The Internet has desirable locations and bad neighbourhoods, just like The Real World (TM).

The problem starts when people get flooded with communication. I get five to twenty electronic messages a day, and two to ten pieces of paper mail. The paper is easy to sort. Colourful, machine-addressed envelopes go into a heap to open later -- life's too short for press releases and catalogues. Real letters, I open -- first, the ones whose post-mark tells me who they're from.

In my electronic mail-boxes, I have only the "post-mark" to go on. Say I have five messages: two from jo.shmo@aol.com; one from x-higgins@mit.edu; one from msmith@ddn.mil and finally something from scam@pericles.com.

The first two I put aside. The third, I've been eagerly waiting for. The fourth looks like a very, very interesting surprise; and the fifth comes from what is by consensus the the worst address on the net. I forward it back to the sender with a note that I died last week, so don't bother me again, or else.

How can I tell what's what?

Mostly, by knowing how Internet addresses work. You read them from the right-hand end. The right-most part tells you what kind of computer system the user is on. Then you get an abbreviation for the organisation name, then maybe a department name or the name of a computer. Professor Anne Hathaway in the Department of Obfuscation at the notorious University of Winnesota could be a_hathaway@obfusc.wta.edu.

Just as UK postage stamps don't deign to say what country they're from -- because "we" invented the things -- Internet addresses in the US don't bother to say so. Instead, they say what kind of site they are. Sites outside the US are identified by a two- letter country-code.

Addresses ending with .mil are definitely tops for prestige. This is not because netizens have any particular feelings about the US military. It is because the net originated as a military project, and its experts, grizzled old-timers and top-notch Gurus On Duty have military addresses.

Next are the universities -- .edu sites in the US, and .ac.uk for "academic, UK" here. Here, user-names are important. Real names are for Real People: x-higgins@mit.edu is likely to be Professor Xavier Higgins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or at least a post-graduate researcher there; q9s235@husc.mit.edu, on the other hand, is certainly a lowly student.

Further down the food chain we find non-profit organisations .org and commercial sites: .com in the US, .co.uk in the UK. Some of the latter are companies -- like ibm.com and bbc.co.uk.

Others are public-access Internet services -- like delphi.com, America Online .aol.com and Demon .demon.co.uk. Telling these apart depends on experience and prejudice, particularly when reading Usenet news-group discussions. As Daniel Dern (author of the Internet Guide for New Users) put it in the self- referential news-group alt.culture.usenet: "Up till a few years ago, other than the September onslaught of new students, new users tended to be part of a particular peer community -- physicists or librarians for example -- which meant they probably had peers who would help (or chastise) them... the new rush of end-users are often completely unsupported."

Users of AOL, for example, are assumed to be new; and new users clog up news-groups with requests for information which is obvious to find, once you know. AOL is notorious for posting each message several times. Arrogant slightly-less-new users who don't know this blame the "newbie" rather than the AOL software, often vociferously.

There are other, rather complex, "don'ts" of Internet and Usenet textual intercourse. All new student users are instructed to read the contents of the news-group news.announce.newusers, which is a book-worth of tips and hints; few seem to bother. Not all the commercial services even make it available. (It, and Frequently Asked Questions lists, can be fetched by ftp from a site called rtfm.mit.edu -- "rt" stands for "read the" and "m" for "manual" -- but this is often overloaded.)

Then there are the pariah sites: particularly pericles.com. This is owned by the US lawyers Canter & Siegel, who angered the entire net by deluging Usenet with adverts.

The net effect is that, as in the real world, the worse your address, the harder you have to try to be taken seriously. Back in the mists of time when the net was informal, I was kindly lent an account by A Major UK Academic Institution. For a science writer, it was wonderful. Despite my dutiful disclaimers, professors all over the world corresponded with me as an equal -- noting the .ac.uk address.

Now I sometimes use mikeh@gn.apc.org -- which once a month gets a puzzled "so how do you get a US address in London"? Actually it's GreenNet, ten minutes' walk away and affiliated to the Association for Progressive Communications in Rio de Janeiro; but it's sometimes useful to appear American. I can be German, too, on the Manchester Host as mike.holderness@mcr1.geonet.de. If I use mch@cix.compulink.co.uk I'm assumed to be a British computer enthusiast -- you know, greasy glasses.Whatever, I have to explain myself a lot more.

One day I'll get around to registering my very own site, the net equivalent of founding a town -- perhaps holderness.co.uk. Not just yet, though. It'd mark me out as just a bit too keen.

And if everyone did it, the net would be in serious trouble. All these site addresses are only human-readable synonyms for the real addresses, which look like 254.232.1.3. As Lee McLoughlin, a system administrator at London's Imperial College, points out, the net is "very rapidly running out of these addresses already". The fixes to accommodate individual sites will be "technically interesting", as the car mechanic would say while sucking her teeth and sizing you up for a big bill.

All addresses and characters, other than mine, are, I sincerely hope, fictitious.

home

Written:
27 July 1994

An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

Addendum, November 1996

When I wrote this, I was trying to keep mch@cix. compulink.co.uk as my "private" email address. I'd give it to people I actually wanted to hear from. But then the Guardian scuppered the plan by publishing that address at the end of all my articles.

It took me most of a year to rearrange my email usage so that the above was my "public" address -- the one you'll find referenced on these pages. I check it once every day or two. I use it for mailing lists, too.

If you write to me there, I will (eventually) respond. If the correspondence looks set to be particularly interesting and/or urgent, you'll get a reply from yet another address, not listed here, which I check four or more times a day.

Now I just have to persuade the hopeful White Pages sites like http://Four11.com/ to remove the unwanted addresses.