I’m doing it again. Friends who know me in real life know that I’m a fan of frequent change. For instance, people have been known to visit once a week for a month and see the furniture rearranged each time. I do the same sort of thing elsewhere in my life from jobs (I’m lucky – my job is project based and so it is changed, often dramatically, several times each year). On the one hand, this sort of approach adds novelty to my life, and this is something that I crave. On the other hand, I think it adds another important component: constant improvement.
Here’s an example: Over 10 years ago, Sage and I lived in a two story row house in Pennsylvania. In one of our early arrangements we actually had the television and VCR (back when we had one) in the living room, the stereo in the dining room near the computer, and (get this), the videos and CDs in one room upstairs, and the cassettes in another room upstairs. Until we’d rearranged a few times we never thought to put the things in the same room. That’s an extreme example, but I think it makes clear the idea that questioning what you’re doing and why is a good thing to do and trying out new routines is equally good.
To that end, I’m trying to change a few online habits. For some time now, some might say say from the minute AOL subscribers were allowed to go on the net back in about 1995, I’ve been complaining how the essential feel of the Internet has been changing for the worse. What used to be a small community of intelligent people not particularly focused on selling to one another rapidly seemed to degrade into an advertising filled abyss of insipid marketing (and self-promoting) content with a healthy dose of stupid trolls to boot. And since then I’ve been, to one degree or another, experiencing the Internet like a bad night on the town. It’s fun while one is in the middle of it but when you get away from it you wake up with a bad taste in your mouth and sometimes even an embarrassed “I can’t believe I said that to that person.” feeling.
It wasn’t until recently, though, that I realized that the Internet is just like a very diverse city. It’s virtual, yes, but the fact of the matter is, one’s impression of it is defined not by what it is but by how you experience it. To use a real world example, readers of this blog know that I love Toronto. But more specifically, I love Toronto as experienced via transit and on foot, going to the places I like to go (Kensington Market, the libraries, the Island), and participating in the things I like to participate in (Critical Mass, Pedestrian Sundays, Cycling on the Leslie Spit on a warm summer’s day.) I do know, though, that I’d hate this city experienced in other ways. If I were to drive everywhere, go to night clubs on the weekends, spend most of my time at Eaton Centre or Yorkville, I would have a totally different impression of the city and probably wouldn’t stick around very long.
I realized early on that going to the same places and doing the same things as most people did not make me happy and actually in many cases was unpleasant. I am not most people. And in the early days of computing, whether we’re talking about the pre-AOL Internet, or even back in the BBS days, people involved with computers were also not most people. And so, in the early doing what many of the other netizens did was more likely to make me happy because most people hadn’t arrived. It was just a few of us. The “popular kids” (the ones who grew up to be Marketers, Public Relations flacks, and “Social Media Experts”) hadn’t arrived yet so what was popular online was very different (and often more appealing to me) than what was popular offline.
Well guess what? The popular kids, the jocks, the folks I could never relate to growing up, have arrived, starting with a big tour bus full of ‘em from the Branson of the Internet, AOL, and continuing now for coming up on 15 years.
Meanwhile, just as my CDs were upstairs and my CD player was downstairs for months, I’ve been doing something foolish without noticing I was doing it. I have continued to follow what’s popular for years after the arbiters of mass online popularity have changed (or at least the ones I used to listen to have been drowned out by the voice of “Most People”). This has lead me down blind alleys like twitter (why, I’m wondering now, would I participate in mass social interaction online when I vastly prefer small, intimate groups offline?), or reading the comments on news stories, written by “most people” that never fail to piss me off. The net was a sanctuary from “most people” and without really noticing it, I went from listening to my inner voice and those of who I consider to be my peers and started listening to them.
But here’s the cool thing: Though “most people” are online now, the cool people are still around (and many more have arrived, thanks to the proliferation of cheap high speed access.) The people who still know what a BBS door was, those who know that Majordomo is not a person or a new Anime series, the operators of Bitnet Relay and the denizens of rec.food.veg and Vegan-L are still here. The trick is finding them. But just as you won’t often find the anarchists hanging out in Yorkville (try Kensington Market), and you won’t find the vegans at Korean Grill House (try the Karma Co-op), you’re unlikely to find them or people like them in the popular Internet neighbourhoods. Sure, some left when “most people” arrived, but others are around working on Creative Commons projects, open source software, the EFF, and elsewhere. Look for sites that you’re interested in but don’t automatically assume that your people are in the biggest or most popular one you find. If you’re an anarchist vegan looking for vegan discussion, and pick the first vegan discussion forum you find you might find yourself amongst the yoga mat carrying, lululemon wearing crowd who went vegan because their favourite musican went vegan and they heard that you could lose lots of weight that way. Search, and network. But don’t blindly network with everyone, build a small network of trusted people. We don’t call everyone we meet in a bar, a friend and take their recommendations for books to read, why should we add everyone we meet online as a friend and read their links?
Here’s another cool thing, though. Everything has a purpose. And “most people” have a purpose as well. Bringing commerce to the web attracted marketers and salespeople who are sometimes willing to build good tools (google’s empire being the best example) and content for the promise of making money. So just as the folks in Yorkville might annoy me and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with them, I’m really glad they spend money in Toronto – their money is just as helpful as mine (and often in greater quantity) in improving my city’s infrastructure.
So that’s what I’ll be doing over the next few weeks, I expect: Reassessing what Internet services actually are enhancing my life, and what are just popular because “Most people” are there but don’t actually give anything back to me. I came to the Internet to get a break from “most people” – I don’t need to bring them back in.
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