Ten Years After
It was in January 1995 that I first set foot into the world of Usenet newsgroups. I started out in search of people who thought Bill Clinton more than a little disturbing and with whom I could commiserate. And I found them. Mostly they had gravitated to a group called alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater, which had then still a frontier town atmosphere about it.
You could get shot in the back moseying down the streets of that place. It wasn't very long before someone accused me of being a CIA agent, and that's probably the nicest thing I was called going forward.
By the start of 1996 the Usenet political newsgroups no longer had the character of a frontier town, but had become more like a future-world ice hockey rink, where the wood blades of the hockey sticks had been replaced with foot-long straight razors and the puck was a lump of plutonium. A turn on the ice could last for hours. But there were some spectacular discussions.
There's not much fun of that kind left on Usenet political groups nowadays. The ice has melted. The best skaters have retired to the uplands of websites and blogs. And a crew of low-lifes have parked themselves around the old rink, spilling sewage into it and on anything that resembles a real discussion. Hence my occasional references to the "Usenet sewers."
But there was real action in those groups during the last decade. I felt compelled to think more precisely, write more clearly, and face instant examination of my thoughts and words. I've encountered some of the best people and some of the worst, some of the smartest and some who amaze me that they could even make it alive when crossing the street. Now the good stuff has been crowded out, though not entirely, by people who would be taking a step up in society if they moved to the dark encampments of the homeless beneath New York City's Grand Central Terminal -- people for whom insane asylums would be like Boca Raton.
One of the last and best of the old skaters is Mike Soja, who always impressed me with his ability to go into the corners and come out with the puck and even today can rocket a shot on goal that leaves me awestruck (the ice on the rink magically refreezes when Mike comes off the bench). Mike says he doesn't get the "same charge" out of blogs that he still manages to get out of Usenet newsgroups, and there's no mystery to that. It's the difference between commenting on things and being right in the middle of them.
If you use your filter correctly, screening out the posts of some of the more savage imbeciles, you can even today get a glimpse of the grand irradiated hockey match that once was.
You could get shot in the back moseying down the streets of that place. It wasn't very long before someone accused me of being a CIA agent, and that's probably the nicest thing I was called going forward.
By the start of 1996 the Usenet political newsgroups no longer had the character of a frontier town, but had become more like a future-world ice hockey rink, where the wood blades of the hockey sticks had been replaced with foot-long straight razors and the puck was a lump of plutonium. A turn on the ice could last for hours. But there were some spectacular discussions.
There's not much fun of that kind left on Usenet political groups nowadays. The ice has melted. The best skaters have retired to the uplands of websites and blogs. And a crew of low-lifes have parked themselves around the old rink, spilling sewage into it and on anything that resembles a real discussion. Hence my occasional references to the "Usenet sewers."
But there was real action in those groups during the last decade. I felt compelled to think more precisely, write more clearly, and face instant examination of my thoughts and words. I've encountered some of the best people and some of the worst, some of the smartest and some who amaze me that they could even make it alive when crossing the street. Now the good stuff has been crowded out, though not entirely, by people who would be taking a step up in society if they moved to the dark encampments of the homeless beneath New York City's Grand Central Terminal -- people for whom insane asylums would be like Boca Raton.
One of the last and best of the old skaters is Mike Soja, who always impressed me with his ability to go into the corners and come out with the puck and even today can rocket a shot on goal that leaves me awestruck (the ice on the rink magically refreezes when Mike comes off the bench). Mike says he doesn't get the "same charge" out of blogs that he still manages to get out of Usenet newsgroups, and there's no mystery to that. It's the difference between commenting on things and being right in the middle of them.
If you use your filter correctly, screening out the posts of some of the more savage imbeciles, you can even today get a glimpse of the grand irradiated hockey match that once was.
Comments
After so many years, the switch to the Blog was a process of getting used to the way it's done there, and a discovery process of how I tend to process ideas.
I have found that my writings on my own blog, particularly the long form, have a tendency to be better than most of the stuff I wrote while on Usenet. I'm not really sure why, but I suppose for lack of a better conclusion that time pressures are the reason; One feels a certain pressure to respond quickly to a thread on Usenet... moreso than when one is posting a Blog article. I've discovered too, that some of that time pressure comes back when you're doing a large amount of back and forth in the comments section.... mine or someone else's.
As I said over the Christmas week: ... the writing of a coulmn for me has becomes more an effort of exploring a subject; the codification of random thoughts. The act of putting those thoughts into words on a screen allows me to think about, and RE-think about the subject at hand. My thoughts on a given subject often do not fully take shape until such time as I've re-written them twice. Often, indeed... usually, the ideas are already there, waiting to be cast into words, but not fully defined until the act of sitting down and typing them out.The time constraints naturally attached to the immidiate nature of a usenet tread or a comments section tend to limit my ability to think things through... and re-write them... and thus the quality of my writing and frankly of my thought processes falter.
Not that that lack of time changes my mind on any given point; It's just that I cannot seem to back my arguments as well under such constraints, if you follow me.
That said, there's one other thing that took me out of Usenet to a large degree... the recent change of things at Google in what was the DejaNews archives. The new interface really sucks sewage. And while Agent is nice, I find it overwhelmed trying to deal with the amounts of crap in those channels today.
Now, of course, like many other political NGs, a.f.d-q has long since been overrun by the moonbats; they've sucked the joy out of it. There's no point in presenting a cogent argument to a 'cheerful' lunatic who foams at the mouth in his haste to call you as many names as possible while ducking the point. (Right: no names, please.) With few exceptions, even the more rational ones have gone off the deep end.
That's why I bowed out. I miss the give-and-take, but I don't see it coming back.