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hrjSo, being as I’m one of those people who obsessively analyzes modes and styles of communication, I’ve always been fascinated by the multitude of different non-electronic communication modes that various electronic communication modes echo and emulate. And it’s especially fascinating how the analogies shift and change over time. Hang on: this is going to get poetic.
This is all, of course, based solely on my own personal experiences and perceptions, and on the specific electronic communications I’ve participated in. I haven’t been an early adopter of much of anything, and there are some bits and pieces that I skipped over entirely – pretty much like I entirely skipped the CD-player phenomenon and only started collecting music CDs after getting an iPod. I participated briefly in a dial-up home-based BBS back in … what, it must have been the late ‘80s? Early ‘90s? A lot of my more techie friends were on the WELL or similar services but I didn’t catch the wave at that time. Mostly it was a learning curve and “activation energy” issue. So what with one thing and another, I didn’t really get on the net until I started grad school and not only got a free e-mail account but had a practical need to do something with it.
It isn’t any big insightful breakthrough to say that, for me, personal e-mail has always seemed like a direct analog for phone calls. Phone calls with more convenient timing. And just like I’ve always had a mental block about cold-calling friends and acquaintances for no particular reason, I think it bled over into how I handle e-mail. I’ll e-mail people when I have a specific purpose or question, or when there are goal-oriented arrangements to set up, but I’ve never really gotten into the habit of e-mailing people randomly out of the blue just to chat – and certainly not doing it to distant acquaintances or strangers. On the other hand, e-mail (and any other on-line communication mode) brought a couple of major advantages for me over the telephone. I didn’t have to deal with the near panic-attack phobia I had about initiating phone calls. Well, ok, at least not so much. I’ve had a few e-mails where the panic started to kick in as the finger approached the “send” button. (And maybe a few where I should have listened to it and hit “delete” instead.) The other advantage is that I’m much more a writer than a talker. Online I can come off as erudite and incisive. In person … well, in person I have a hard time getting a word in edgewise, so who can tell?
So in addition to personal e-mails, my initial introduction to the net was mailing lists. Mailing lists have seemed to me to be an analog for club meetings … or in some cases for the stereotypical neighborhood bar, or maybe a church social. You’ve got a not entirely random group of people chatting about whatever the topic is that the group organized around, with regular digressions and gossip. It’s semi-public but still has a “defined group” feel to the experience. There are movers and shakers; there are people who just hang out – a few who only show up for the refreshments. But mailing lists – even fairly large ones – have always had a “small group” feel to them for me.
Just as I was behind the curve on the whole BBS thing, I was several years behind the curve on Usenet. Although I didn’t come in via AOL, my timing was just on the trailing edge of Eternal September, so I only know about the early years from tales told around the campfire. At that time, Usenet groups still seemed to have a momentum as the analog of the civic plaza. I think rec.org.sca hit it dead-on with the nickname ‘the Rialto’, with the sense that – at the time – it was the Forum, the Agora, the place through which everyone (who was anyone) passed at some point during the day. You might bump into anyone in town, and the chances are that anyone you met would at least recognize you in passing.
Everyone has their own explanation of what started undermining Usenet as a community-building and community-binding force. Maybe it was the barbarians pouring through the gates, but I think it wasn’t that they were barbarians, but simply that there were so many of them. The market-place got crowded. You were trying to catch up on the gossip with your friend, but you couldn’t get closer than two stalls away due to the crowds, and you had to shout to be heard over the din. You didn’t know who all these people were – and frankly, you didn’t care. You just wanted to hang out with your friends somewhere you could hear yourself think and where your conversations wouldn’t be interrupted by gangs of street-urchins dashing through their midst. Someone said, “Hey, let’s go hang out at the guildhall – there’s plenty of space to sit around there.” Someone else said, “I have this lovely barge on the river where it’s cooler – bring some wine and let’s have a party.” And a lot of people started throwing private dinner parties. Eventually most of the people you’d been going to the Forum to chat with had filled up their social calendars and on those occasions when you found yourself crossing the plaza it always seemed to be 2am and no one else was hanging out there except some seedy looking fellows in the shadows and …hey, was that someone getting mugged over there in the alley? Better just keep moving.
Warning: metaphor switch – beware mental whiplash. The rec.arts.sf newsgroups, when I first encountered them, seemed like a good analogy for a fun, general-interest sf con. You met fascinating people, had some outrageously peculiar and interesting conversations, and felt like part of an enormous – if diffuse – worldwide community. Then one day you noticed that you hadn’t seen some of your favorite people at any of the panels or hanging out in the con suite for quite some time. Well, maybe Life happened – people gafiate, it happens. But then so-and-so mentioned having a great time with those same people off in a private room party. And it seemed like more and more of the folks you’d come to the con to see were spending the majority of their time in room parties. And some of the parties were open and had fliers posted, but a lot of them were private – or if not overtly private, you had to be told the room number and when to show up. And even if you got invited to them, suddenly you were spending the entire convention hanging out with a very small subset of the people attending it. People would later express regret for never snagging you for a dinner run, and you’d realize that you didn’t even know they’d been at the same convention.
When a lot of the socializing aspects of Usenet and mailing lists started bleeding off into blogs and journals, it really did feel like I’d gone to a convention (or an SCA event) only to discover that 90% of the action was in private room parties (or private encampment parties). And it’s not like anyone has a right to complain – freedom of association and all that. You can’t make people be part of a particular community or participate in that community in a particular way. But something had been lost. And I don’t think it was lost through selfishness of those who left or through boorishness of those on the more public spaces – I think the larger, more inclusive communities were victims of their own success. Human beings have a hard time relating to 5000 people in the same way they can related to 500 people; and they relate to 500 people differently from 50 people.
A lot of the original structure – especially of Usenet – was designed to avoid unnecessary fragmentation, but eventually the dam burst. Dozens of venues set up the ability to create groups and lists on the whim of the moment. People lost the habit of checking to see if they were re-inventing the wheel -- or simply had no way of knowing how to check. Or they thought their wheel design was so much better than anybody else’s that it didn’t matter. There may be only 10 people in the world interested in talking about gort-burnishers, but I can predict that they will be distributed across alt.talk.gort.burnishing, gort_burnish@groups.yahoo.com, http://www.burnish-my-gort.org, and community.livejournal.com/gortables. The dam burst, and the water is running in thousands of little streamlets. Half of them will sink into the earth and disappear. Some will live on only in damp tracks. Only a few will be large enough, or will merge and retain enough volume to make it as far as the sea.
The initial strength of the net was that it enabled people to make connections across vast distances and out of a vast sea of people. But the next stage was when that vast mass of clotted cream started separating out into individual curds. I think we’re still in the stage where the curds are shrinking and curing and divesting themselves of excess whey. I don’t know whether it will ever get pressed back into a solid block of cheddar or whether we’ll be curds and whey forever.
You can know and talk to everyone in a small town, but when you move to the big city you just can’t. You’re going to start thinking in terms of your neighborhood, or your church, or your workplace, or the club you joined. And people who are outside those circles just aren’t real to you in the same way. Some of my initial uneasiness about blogs/journals was confirmed when I started lurking in a few just to figure out what it was all about and noticed how self-referential they seemed. It wasn’t just that person X was now talking only to persons W, Y, and Z who were on the same blog/journal site, but it seemed like a lot of the time person X was also only talking about persons W, Y, and Z – as if the rest of the world not only wasn’t part of the conversation but had entirely ceased to be important. It frightened me that I seemed to have disappeared out of some of my friends’ lives and consciousnesses because they had moved to Blogland and I hadn’t.
Well, obviously I got over it. Or I was assimilated. Or something. I think I’ll go with assimilated, because now I find myself thinking, “If people want to know what’s going on in my life, they can just read my journal.” But that’s not entirely true. For me, my journal is much more an analog of that boring chatty Christmas letter from Aunt Sue which tells you all about what the children have been doing. And I always had a somewhat limited mailing list for the Christmas letters (which I still manage to do at least every other year). But I do know that now that I’m posting day-to-day stuff in my lj I’m much less likely to go into deal in one-on-one conversations – if only because I’m afraid of boring people who have already read it all.
On the other hand, it isn’t entirely that I stopped sharing my life with people in other venues – it’s more that a lot of the people I was interested in sharing it with had already left those other venues. I’ll never find them all again, though there are people I hadn’t really talked to before who I’m now meeting in some of the new places I’m hanging out. But it’s a specific and limited set of people – there are folks I will never happen to bump into here. I still think the analogy is to a lot of little private parties. Some people are more comfortable than others about knocking on doors and inviting themselves in and I think it works fairly well for them. I’ve always been one of the people who never heard about the parties until someone asked me why I hadn’t been there. I still get a little creeped out at the notion of going to a real-life convention or event and having people want to know that I exist in live-journal-land before they know whether they want to talk to me.
To what extent are our communities shaped by the available communication technology? To what extent do the basic essentials of human nature overwhelm the technological options? And where are the snows of yesteryear?
This is all, of course, based solely on my own personal experiences and perceptions, and on the specific electronic communications I’ve participated in. I haven’t been an early adopter of much of anything, and there are some bits and pieces that I skipped over entirely – pretty much like I entirely skipped the CD-player phenomenon and only started collecting music CDs after getting an iPod. I participated briefly in a dial-up home-based BBS back in … what, it must have been the late ‘80s? Early ‘90s? A lot of my more techie friends were on the WELL or similar services but I didn’t catch the wave at that time. Mostly it was a learning curve and “activation energy” issue. So what with one thing and another, I didn’t really get on the net until I started grad school and not only got a free e-mail account but had a practical need to do something with it.
It isn’t any big insightful breakthrough to say that, for me, personal e-mail has always seemed like a direct analog for phone calls. Phone calls with more convenient timing. And just like I’ve always had a mental block about cold-calling friends and acquaintances for no particular reason, I think it bled over into how I handle e-mail. I’ll e-mail people when I have a specific purpose or question, or when there are goal-oriented arrangements to set up, but I’ve never really gotten into the habit of e-mailing people randomly out of the blue just to chat – and certainly not doing it to distant acquaintances or strangers. On the other hand, e-mail (and any other on-line communication mode) brought a couple of major advantages for me over the telephone. I didn’t have to deal with the near panic-attack phobia I had about initiating phone calls. Well, ok, at least not so much. I’ve had a few e-mails where the panic started to kick in as the finger approached the “send” button. (And maybe a few where I should have listened to it and hit “delete” instead.) The other advantage is that I’m much more a writer than a talker. Online I can come off as erudite and incisive. In person … well, in person I have a hard time getting a word in edgewise, so who can tell?
So in addition to personal e-mails, my initial introduction to the net was mailing lists. Mailing lists have seemed to me to be an analog for club meetings … or in some cases for the stereotypical neighborhood bar, or maybe a church social. You’ve got a not entirely random group of people chatting about whatever the topic is that the group organized around, with regular digressions and gossip. It’s semi-public but still has a “defined group” feel to the experience. There are movers and shakers; there are people who just hang out – a few who only show up for the refreshments. But mailing lists – even fairly large ones – have always had a “small group” feel to them for me.
Just as I was behind the curve on the whole BBS thing, I was several years behind the curve on Usenet. Although I didn’t come in via AOL, my timing was just on the trailing edge of Eternal September, so I only know about the early years from tales told around the campfire. At that time, Usenet groups still seemed to have a momentum as the analog of the civic plaza. I think rec.org.sca hit it dead-on with the nickname ‘the Rialto’, with the sense that – at the time – it was the Forum, the Agora, the place through which everyone (who was anyone) passed at some point during the day. You might bump into anyone in town, and the chances are that anyone you met would at least recognize you in passing.
Everyone has their own explanation of what started undermining Usenet as a community-building and community-binding force. Maybe it was the barbarians pouring through the gates, but I think it wasn’t that they were barbarians, but simply that there were so many of them. The market-place got crowded. You were trying to catch up on the gossip with your friend, but you couldn’t get closer than two stalls away due to the crowds, and you had to shout to be heard over the din. You didn’t know who all these people were – and frankly, you didn’t care. You just wanted to hang out with your friends somewhere you could hear yourself think and where your conversations wouldn’t be interrupted by gangs of street-urchins dashing through their midst. Someone said, “Hey, let’s go hang out at the guildhall – there’s plenty of space to sit around there.” Someone else said, “I have this lovely barge on the river where it’s cooler – bring some wine and let’s have a party.” And a lot of people started throwing private dinner parties. Eventually most of the people you’d been going to the Forum to chat with had filled up their social calendars and on those occasions when you found yourself crossing the plaza it always seemed to be 2am and no one else was hanging out there except some seedy looking fellows in the shadows and …hey, was that someone getting mugged over there in the alley? Better just keep moving.
Warning: metaphor switch – beware mental whiplash. The rec.arts.sf newsgroups, when I first encountered them, seemed like a good analogy for a fun, general-interest sf con. You met fascinating people, had some outrageously peculiar and interesting conversations, and felt like part of an enormous – if diffuse – worldwide community. Then one day you noticed that you hadn’t seen some of your favorite people at any of the panels or hanging out in the con suite for quite some time. Well, maybe Life happened – people gafiate, it happens. But then so-and-so mentioned having a great time with those same people off in a private room party. And it seemed like more and more of the folks you’d come to the con to see were spending the majority of their time in room parties. And some of the parties were open and had fliers posted, but a lot of them were private – or if not overtly private, you had to be told the room number and when to show up. And even if you got invited to them, suddenly you were spending the entire convention hanging out with a very small subset of the people attending it. People would later express regret for never snagging you for a dinner run, and you’d realize that you didn’t even know they’d been at the same convention.
When a lot of the socializing aspects of Usenet and mailing lists started bleeding off into blogs and journals, it really did feel like I’d gone to a convention (or an SCA event) only to discover that 90% of the action was in private room parties (or private encampment parties). And it’s not like anyone has a right to complain – freedom of association and all that. You can’t make people be part of a particular community or participate in that community in a particular way. But something had been lost. And I don’t think it was lost through selfishness of those who left or through boorishness of those on the more public spaces – I think the larger, more inclusive communities were victims of their own success. Human beings have a hard time relating to 5000 people in the same way they can related to 500 people; and they relate to 500 people differently from 50 people.
A lot of the original structure – especially of Usenet – was designed to avoid unnecessary fragmentation, but eventually the dam burst. Dozens of venues set up the ability to create groups and lists on the whim of the moment. People lost the habit of checking to see if they were re-inventing the wheel -- or simply had no way of knowing how to check. Or they thought their wheel design was so much better than anybody else’s that it didn’t matter. There may be only 10 people in the world interested in talking about gort-burnishers, but I can predict that they will be distributed across alt.talk.gort.burnishing, gort_burnish@groups.yahoo.com, http://www.burnish-my-gort.org, and community.livejournal.com/gortables. The dam burst, and the water is running in thousands of little streamlets. Half of them will sink into the earth and disappear. Some will live on only in damp tracks. Only a few will be large enough, or will merge and retain enough volume to make it as far as the sea.
The initial strength of the net was that it enabled people to make connections across vast distances and out of a vast sea of people. But the next stage was when that vast mass of clotted cream started separating out into individual curds. I think we’re still in the stage where the curds are shrinking and curing and divesting themselves of excess whey. I don’t know whether it will ever get pressed back into a solid block of cheddar or whether we’ll be curds and whey forever.
You can know and talk to everyone in a small town, but when you move to the big city you just can’t. You’re going to start thinking in terms of your neighborhood, or your church, or your workplace, or the club you joined. And people who are outside those circles just aren’t real to you in the same way. Some of my initial uneasiness about blogs/journals was confirmed when I started lurking in a few just to figure out what it was all about and noticed how self-referential they seemed. It wasn’t just that person X was now talking only to persons W, Y, and Z who were on the same blog/journal site, but it seemed like a lot of the time person X was also only talking about persons W, Y, and Z – as if the rest of the world not only wasn’t part of the conversation but had entirely ceased to be important. It frightened me that I seemed to have disappeared out of some of my friends’ lives and consciousnesses because they had moved to Blogland and I hadn’t.
Well, obviously I got over it. Or I was assimilated. Or something. I think I’ll go with assimilated, because now I find myself thinking, “If people want to know what’s going on in my life, they can just read my journal.” But that’s not entirely true. For me, my journal is much more an analog of that boring chatty Christmas letter from Aunt Sue which tells you all about what the children have been doing. And I always had a somewhat limited mailing list for the Christmas letters (which I still manage to do at least every other year). But I do know that now that I’m posting day-to-day stuff in my lj I’m much less likely to go into deal in one-on-one conversations – if only because I’m afraid of boring people who have already read it all.
On the other hand, it isn’t entirely that I stopped sharing my life with people in other venues – it’s more that a lot of the people I was interested in sharing it with had already left those other venues. I’ll never find them all again, though there are people I hadn’t really talked to before who I’m now meeting in some of the new places I’m hanging out. But it’s a specific and limited set of people – there are folks I will never happen to bump into here. I still think the analogy is to a lot of little private parties. Some people are more comfortable than others about knocking on doors and inviting themselves in and I think it works fairly well for them. I’ve always been one of the people who never heard about the parties until someone asked me why I hadn’t been there. I still get a little creeped out at the notion of going to a real-life convention or event and having people want to know that I exist in live-journal-land before they know whether they want to talk to me.
To what extent are our communities shaped by the available communication technology? To what extent do the basic essentials of human nature overwhelm the technological options? And where are the snows of yesteryear?
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-02 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-02 11:52 pm (UTC)Working on the draft -- will get you comments tomorrow or so.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 12:46 am (UTC)Houseboat / R.L. Delamancha
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 03:39 am (UTC)Social sites like LJ and special-interest blogs like Groklaw are, for now, a pretty good balance between getting your voice heard and keeping your reading list down to something manageable. But I need to get back to Usenet, at least a little bit, because I miss the "bumping-into-people-in-the-hallway" aspect of a world-wide, unrestricted medium with readership in the tens of thousands.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-04 04:00 pm (UTC)As for Usenet, though, it was indeed the barbarians that drove me away. S/N ratio was always low, but the noise itself became increasingly repellent.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-04 05:25 pm (UTC)I've made the 5000:500:50 observation before in SCA contexts -- typically when people are bemoaning why we don't just have one big happy family around the eric anymore. Or why the entire kingdom doesn't interact with the royalty the way the royalty's best buds do. Or why people get more focused on their local group or their household than on the principality or kingdom. The idea has generally been met with incomprehension, but I'll keep tossing it out there. It's frustrating when people keep trying to implement 500-person solutions for 5000-person group scales.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-05 02:51 pm (UTC)