(Getting rather tedious, no? I'm almost finished. For now.)
I don't know of too many pursuits in the human endeavor where large masses of people, in the midst of their daily routines, discover a strange object and start poking it with their finger saying "I wonder what THIS does...." MOST of us have a better sense of self-preservation in ordinary circumstances to not put ourselves in harm's way before getting a better understanding of risk and reward.
But in the bullet-proof atmosphere of the Internet, life does not play by the same rules. At least, that is the overwhelming perception that fuels the web. I don't know of too many social situations, for example, where one walks into a room of strangers and begins talking; saying things to be agreeable, or, depending on one's need for attention--virtual or real--saying things to be disagreeable. Most of us don't even LIKE conversation with strangers, but it is de rigueur in the world beyond Zero. So that is exactly what happened over the past ten years. Without even considering the social consequences, hordes dove in because, in fact, there WERE NO social consequences. At least, not immediate ones.
When MySpace opened for business, LEGIONS of fully-formed finger-pokers were ready to start publishing their own little scripted reality shows. They had the TOOLS. They had the Curiosity. Perhaps even more significantly, they had the NEED.
The tools were founded on primitive platforms, rickety structures which have remained UNCHANGED since their founding. The first was electronic mail, first called E-mail, and then SHORTENED to the snappier email. The second was the Internet Relay Chat, irc, or chat. Before the advent of America Online, it was all I had.
I remember once going into a bookstore and while I was browsing I started to listen to the proprietor complaining to a customer / friend that his wife was on the computer all the time. He said that she would dash into the kitchen and make supper and dash back out, taking her dinner with her to the computer room. He was distraught. It was poignant, and not solely because this guy was kind of a short, stocky Elvis impersonator. His wife and life were changing before his eyes and he had no idea what was going on. The thing was, I could have EXPLAINED it all to him, but I did not.
What exactly would be the point of trying to tell him that the chance encounters his wife was having with those same legions who would later immigrate to MySpace but were at the present having an orgy of social intercourse they only dreamed about since high school and that, sorry Dude, but you just can't compete..... give it a few years until something even better comes along.
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I am to this day still thinking of that bookstore guy and his wife. I know it was chatrooms because she was a woman. Had it been a guy, it would have been a toss up between chatrooms and pornography, and AOL popularized both.
Here is an interesting story which I read in the Boston Globe several years ago. And just to make sure that I was not imagining it, I searched the archives (using Google, of course) and there it was. The story goes something like this: about 15 to 20 years ago, there were several, and I mean more than one or two, cases of commuters who marry toll booth operators. If you don't believe me I can drag out the link to the article but that is not the point. The point is that our cultural lifestyle was in such a state of disconnection that the daily contact of about two seconds coupled with a brief exchange of human touch was enough to engender a relationship.
Can you imagine then the tremendous APPEAL of a new way of initiating a conversation with complete strangers where, in fact, the important thing was not how you LOOKED, but what you SAID?
What a paradigm shift.
And not merely for the isolated and lonely, but also for legions like the bookstore wife who had lived their recent lives in intimate company with their spouse but suddenly saw the opportunity to, uh, open up to a complete stranger in a way not deemed..... proper by society or in a way not allowed by the rules of that particular relationship; rules that evolved over the course of their entire relationship which basically said that the time for that type of discourse was basically over because if one party or the other were to suddenly start talking in that flirty high school way it would just seem FISHY.
And speaking of fish, the whole enterprise took on the flavor of FISHING: secret spot, right selection of bait, good hook....... so that when all the conditions were right, when somebody actually acknowledged your presence online, you did indeed feel like you had just caught a big one. Conversation as sport.
That is what I could have told the bookstore guy.
End of Part 4
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