The job interview is almost over, and you're feeling confident. Your resume's tight, and the eye contact has been good. Just before the conversation is wrapped up, however, the interviewer produces a stack of papers from a drawer.
"We've noticed that you post to X-Files fan groups on the Net rather frequently," he says. "You're not one of those conspiracy freaks, are you?"
Or this:
"You've posted at least a dozen times to alt.support.depression and alt.abuse.recovery. Is there anything we should know before we hire you?"
The fact that opinions shared in Usenet newsgroups are less like secrets whispered in a members-only clubhouse, and more like little bylined editorials published in one of the most widely read newspapers on Earth, is not news.
The runaway success of the revamped Deja News, however - which logged more than 100 million page-views last month - is making some Net-watchers ask how much the kinds of archiving and data aggregation tools that sites like Deja News offer could affect the character of Usenet itself.
With the 24-hour-a-day churn in over 50,000 newsgroups funneling one gigabyte of new material a day into the database, says Deja News vice president of marketing David Wilson, "We're positioned to become the largest content aggregator in the world."
Eventually, the service hopes to back-date its archives into the '80s, with tape records of Net-chatter going back to the pre-Web era. And Deja News is going even further, "becoming a superset of Usenet," Wilson says, by adding mailing lists from companies and institutions like Macromedia and the University of California at Berkeley to its daily feed, accessible to anyone as part of the general database.
With all of those offhand remarks rescued from obscurity, and searchable with features such as "Author Profile" that allows users to aggregate posts made under different aliases when the author wasn't careful to remain anonymous, is it time to take the Well's motto, "You own your own words," and turn it into "Your words own you"?
Bruce Koball, one of the organizers of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, thinks the mere act of archiving posts permanently changes the nature of Usenet in a way that its users haven't yet caught up with.
"The whole ethos of Net news was that it was transitory," Koball says. "If you have a meeting over lunch and you air a strong opinion, you wouldn't expect someone to come back a year later and read your statement, letter for letter. People got used to expressing themselves in that kind of venue. Now the expectation doesn't map with the reality."
The preservation of all that information will also be a boon, Koball says, because the high-quality technical information exchanged on the Net will be accessible to future generations.
Wilson points out that Deja News warns new users to consider the worldwide readership before posting to Usenet - though such cautionary messages are several clicks away from the front door. "Any tool ever invented has the potential to do great good or great harm, whether it's a hammer, a gun, or a computer," he offers. "You try to help people not to hurt themselves."
Wilson minimizes the impact that the dossier-building aspect of the service is having on the global conversation. "We're basically a gigantic Usenet server, like thousands of Usenet servers all over the world," he says. "The difference is, our server chooses not to retire the articles after two days or two weeks."
One of the most valuable features of Deja News is the fact that it honors the x-no-archive standard, which allows posters to keep messages out of the archive if they choose to. Many users, however, are unaware that such an option exists.
One group of netsurfers who have found Deja News particularly useful for sketching a person's online presence is journalists. Elizabeth Weise, writer for USA Today's Technology Life section, she says she uses Deja News "in that first sweep of 'Who is this human being?'"
The service can be especially useful for profiling those in the sciences, Weise points out.
Sociologist Marc Smith, who created a program called Netscan that analyzes the output of the newsgroups to map community dynamics in cyberspace, contends that aggregators like Deja News and Reference.com have "completely transformed" the nature of Usenet by making utterances permanent and searchable. (Netscan doesn't offer aggregate information about individual posters by name.)
"When you're using them, these digital media seem like Post-Its," he observes. "Actually, they're chiseled stone tablets that will never wear away."
Even if your searches don't target posters by name, the basic act of tracking traffic patterns in the newsgroups - as Netscan does - can throw the light of researchers' attention on communities that are thriving outside of the scrutiny of the mainstream, Smith says.
"Light's not great when you're in the back of a bar," he explains. "There's a feeling in some of the newsgroups that you're in a little cubbyhole where you can meet just the right people."
Though Smith believes that it would be safer for the participants if certain conversations - such as those about illegal activities - migrated off of Usenet into password-protected spaces, he encourages his fellow researchers to respect even "the perception of privacy."
Elizabeth Reid, author of a chapter in the upcoming book Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications, believes that the ability to compile aggregate portraits of Usenet posters could boost the sense of social responsibility in that medium.
One of Reid's areas of interest is studying the effects that anonymity and multiple user names have on communities. Behavior such drive-by flaming is encouraged by the use of "fragmented personae which can be so easily jettisoned," she observes.
By "tracing multiple links between individual personae" with features like author profiling, Reid writes, tools like Deja News "encourage a holistic projection of self into the virtual landscape." Coherent and persistent online identities, she says, increase the sustainability of online communities by deepening bonds between the members.
Reid agrees with other researchers, however, that services like Deja News mean that the days of feeling "anonymous and safe, hidden behind your computer" are numbered.
"Eventually," she reflects, "we'll all be as paranoid online as we are offline."
