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(I)IRC

If I Recall Correctly... The SciFi Channel (now SyFy) ran an Internet Relay Chat server at least as early as 1997 .  I don't remember exactly when it launched, but I do know it was operational in December 1999 -- because I was logged in on New Year's Eve, spiting Y2K (sure to cause traffic lights to go haywire, hospitals to short-circuit, and planes to literally fall from the skies).  The rooms were full of... well, nerds, of course, but particularly weird  nerds; the server was much lower-populated than the sprawling IRC giants that would arise like Darknet or Xellium or... well, anyway, the point is, there were a handful of chat rooms which each catered to a specific set of about a dozen or so people, and this was (as far as anyone there knew) what was meant by the term "online community." I've been thinking of IRC lately because of the prevalence of the Slack  chat platform, which does a good job of recreating a similar environment with a few more bells and...
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Kenophobia

One of our first assignments in the class "Composing Cyberspace," we were asked to... stop writing in cyberspace.  No social media or texting for five days, but instead, a handwritten journal of our experience, one entry per day. The assignment to me illustrates the fundamental difference the textural "space" of cyberspace represents to different generations.  There's an anecdote from Richard Bartles in Designing Virtual Worlds  of American nerds running up thousand-dollar phone bills connecting to the first multi-user dungeon game, so addictive was the experience of live digital networking.  But if you grow up with the addiction, is it an addiction?  Or is it just... a part of life?  Are we addicted to breathing, when our distant ancestors got along just fine with gills? Day 1 (Thursday, 8/31) I'm a digital immigrant myself.  Before age 12 or so (around 1995 or '96) we had no Internet access in my home.  Not that many did, but I was one of...
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Open Diary 1

My first blog was hosted on the Open Diary platform, in the days before Livejournal and Myspace.  (I did have a Friendster, though.) It was in high school, and I wrote bad poetry and Very Deep Thoughts. I miss having Very Deep Thoughts -- that delicious frission of believing I was the first one to think of a thing, or at the least, I'd joined a select and hidden company of Great Minds. I suppose I'll make do with humbler noise.
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