Showing papers by "Jonathan L. Zittrain published in 1997"

The Rise and Fall of Sysopdom

Abstract: \"Sysop\" has gone from a term of art known only to the bleeding-edge few to a dusty anachronism known only to the bleeding-gums few, without the usual years-long general linguistic acceptance and respect in between. In case the reader is not among the bleeders: sysops (from \"system operators\") run electronic areas accessible by typing furiously on one's networked computer, through which one can meet, talk to (well, at least type at), and develop nuanced social relationships with other people similarly typing and reading. Few know what a sysop is because these electronic areas aspirationally, and sometimes accurately, known as \"online communities\" have never quite flourished and today are in decline. Indeed, \"online community\"joins \"sysop\" in the oversize dustbin of trite or hopelessly esoteric, hence generally meaningless, cyberspace vernacular. Not that \"online community\" is obscure, like \"sysop\"; rather, the term's emptiness results from its abuse. \"Online community\" is used by Internet companies the way a motivational speaker uses \"excellence,\" an academic uses \"new paradigm,\" or a lawyer uses \"justice\": it represents something once craved and still invoked (if only as a linguistic placeholder) even as it is believed by all but the most naTve to be laughably beyond reach. Since it's applied to almost anything, it now means vague warm fuzzies and nothing more. The craft of sysoping and the phenomenon of online community (non-hollowly defined) have gone down together even as the lnternet has burgeoned, and I want to explain what has happened to sysops as a way of explaining what has happened to the truly great and transformative promise of online communities. Law has played a major role in two distinct ways. First, sysops and the members of the communities they lead have struggled through iawlike reflection to arrive at just solutions to the disputes that inevitably arise in the course of their interactions. This struggle is a large part o f what has made the communities so