On 2/10/01 7:48 PM, "J C Lawrence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> The priesthood is dead. That's a good thing.
>
> It also has its downsides. I prefer the new 'net, but I admired the
> old one.
I go back to the time when you could post a party invitation to net.general
with your home address and phone number, and feel safe doing it. And not
have the riot squad show up to control the crowd, either.
(oh, and yes, I did that... Back in the Good Old Days, we used to throw
parties. Heck, we were doing online parties before we discovered usenet --
and my best friend from back then, and his wife, who he met while I was
dating her, just celebrated their 20th anniversary. For those of you who
think online romances are new things... Grin)
The net's changed. I miss the old days when it was smaller, more intimate,
better focussed, less noisy. That's to some degree the kind of environment
I'm trying to re-invent these days with stuff like hockeyfanz. Not big, not
famous, not yahoo, not money-making, not a lot of stuff -- but fun and
interesting. At the same time, though, the current net is a lot of fun, too,
in many different ways, and trying to bodysurf the cyberwave of growth and
change and keep up with what's going on (much less useful and innovative)
has been one hell of a rush, too.
>> Egroups (now yahoogroups) is the online KOA campground for all
>> this stuff, but that's not bad, either. People like to put it
>> down, and it has its issues, but it enables a lot of people who
>> can't afford a Hilton....
>
> I'm not a fan of deliberate ghetto-sation (sp?), even if
> commercially sound/viable.
I'm not sure why you think my referring to it as a KOA campground is
"ghettoizing" it. I didn't intend it that way -- instead, I was trying to
point out that "Yahoo" isn't a community. It's a bunch of independent groups
all hanging out in the same place, renting space. Many of those groups are
communities, but yahoo as the encompassing entity sure isn't.
>>> Okay, so they need a lot of education.
>
>> But who's stepped up to educate?
> They did not take advantage of the material already present,
I think that's a generalization -- a stereotyping. Many of them DID, in
fact, take advantage of that material. And some of them didn't, but in all
honesty, that's ALWAYS been a problem on the net since the early days. I'm
not even sure it was more common in this latest wave. It's just this latest
wave was much bigger, so the percentages could be the same and the noise
still got huge.
But there's another factor at work here, too. A factor similar to the one
that lead to the downfall of the Backbone Cabal of usenet -- the conflict
between the people who were already here and had things set up the way they
wanted, and the people who came after and saw different ways to use the
tools we'd built, and different interests than the ones we thought they
ought to be interested in.
To use an analogy, we were the parents, listening to swing music, and our
kids came along and decided they preferred rock -- and we as parents hated
this new music and tried to stomp it into the ground, which of course didn't
work. In fact, the new music built on what came before, but because it
wasn't what we thought they OUGHT to want to do, we tried to shun it. And
eventually, they tuned us out, did what they wanted anyway, and -- well, the
world didn't come to an end.
And a similar thing is going on here. Some people don't take advantage of
what's there because they're clueless or naïve or lazy -- but another group
isn't, because it's irrelevant. We notice them because they DON'T fit in --
and don't pay attention to all the new ones that do.
The clueless, lazy and naïve have always been with us, since about user #
200 or so. The ones who take what we've built and turn it into their own
vision have been, too -- that's where the innovation comes from (but don't
assume I think all innovation is good; it's where warez came from, for
instance, too). Having now survived a number of these generational things
online, I see the situation repeat itself with variations of a theme -- and
while it's not fun being the group made irrelevant, it's a positive
evolution of things (it's one reason why I'm now pretty serious about
reinventing myself and my stuff -- because I want to be part of the change;
being the Backbone Cabal once is enough, thanks -- I like to learn from my
mistakes).
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
When an agnostic dies, does he go to the "great perhaps"?
