Now, Now Girls, Your Father and I Think You're BOTH Pretty.

Or
How The Comm Has Come Full Circle… One Line At A Time

Dinner tonight (at a local, trendy chain restaurant) consisted of a fair cup of beer cheese soup, five reasonable (though far from outstanding) garlic and herb shrimp, a half order of tepid “seasoned” fries, three refills of Diet Pepsi (bastards didn’t serve Diet Coke) and planning session with my wife (Lisa, for those without a scorecard) about our upcoming Christmas shindig for her friends from work (I work on the Internet… you guys are my friends… no one’s local… BUT, if you’re in town on December 17th, swing by).

This is a discussion on “User Generated Communication / Content”?
Yes it is, hold tight.

Lisa and I were working out the menu and since we’re holding the party right in the middle of party season, by the time the folks get to ours they’re going to be turkeyed and hammed out. Ever wonder why turkey is traditional only at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter? Because most of us troll through so many get-togethers, pot-lucks and soirees we need months to recover before eating one again. My tyrosine level is just fine, thank you. So, instead of turkey, we’re serving chili.

WHAT?!? It’s one thing not to serve turkey or ham… but CHILI? MADNESS! It’ll never fly. Hey, where’s the COMM discussion?
Hang on, Space Ranger.

Yes, I have dedicated myself to the ludicrous challenge of creating a “Christmas Chili”. I’ve set these lax rules for myself:

1. It must be identifiable as chili (for example, a stew is not chili).


2. It must contain some traditional Christmas ingredients (eggnog, lutefisk, cranberries? I dunno which yet; I’ll get back to you on that).


3. It must not suck (one of the guests is a chef and the other is a 4-star restaurant manager -- no pressure or anything).

All this talk of creating a wholly new recipe completely made me miss the experience of the meal I was eating, which is why what was probably a decent plate got the less than stellar review above. In other words, because I was choosing to invest myself in my own fabricated reality, I missed the reality I was currently in (and had paid for).

Within The Comm, I have the option of choosing my inputs in any manner of ways: I can read blogs, crawl through forums, listen to podcasts, etc. However, while choosing a blog on “The Fine Art of Creative Holiday Cooking”, I may simultaneously miss the live ‘netcast of “How to Make a Perfect Christmas Chili”. Worse, I may never know I missed it.

But is that really worse?

I jumped onto The Comm merry-go-round in 1985 with a 300 bps VicModem and the Circuit Circus BBS in Rochester, Minnesota. Like so many forums on the Internet today, it had the “intended” purpose of talking about technology (specifically Commodore 64s), but really was a place to chat about anything, everything and nothing. I picked up girls (“Hey babe, wanna see my coupler?”). Ok, I picked up geek-girls.

If you’ve never used a 300 bps modem, I’ll do my best to explain the experience. Instead of reading posts en masse and at leisure, you would receive them ONE LETTER AT A TIME as the sentences scrolled SLOWLY up the screen. In order to read the posts you had to have patience. But more importantly, when writing them, you took your time, used your mind, and made them worth reading because no one would bother getting to the end otherwise. Then, I got a 1200 bps modem and shortly thereafter a 2400 bps modem.

BAM! The Comm took a hard left and drove down a steep hill. At 300 bps, the world scrolled by slowly. At 1200 bps, it was faster, but you could still read in real-time as the posts scrolled up. But at 2400 bps, suddenly it was TOO FAST. No longer could you just read as it scrolled, you had to pause the screens and read the posts one screen at a time. Very much like using the internet today (but without all the pretty colors, formatting, and mp3s of Ballroom Blitz on Winamp).

So? Isn’t it better that way?

Of course… but no. At the slower speeds, you were able to read EVERYTHING because you had to. There was no way to “scan” a page or “skim” a post… everything was read as you waited for it one letter or sentence at a time. People put a thought into their posts (you hoped) and you did the same (they hoped). In the early days of The Comm, you were more likely to be read word-for-word, not just skimmed over for the highlights. Do I miss the “old days”? HELL NO! Looking back I wonder what made me sit there for hours reading what I can now read in about 90 seconds. But as I write, I admit I miss that people had to read what I laid down because it was fed to them so slowly.

I’m amused at the similarities of the Blogoshpere and the PodCast-o-Phere (?!?) to those early days of BBSing. When chatting on those early BBSes, it might take all day to hold a conversation and people genuinely took their time to write quality material (assuming you hung out on the right kinds of BBSes). Then, as the modems got faster, BBSes gave way to forums, and posts became “threads”, people started interjecting every little thing that popped into their head whether it had to do with the conversation or not (“d00d! UR k-rad! Go Lakerz!”). BUT, that’s only one side of The Comm… THAT side… on THIS side of The Comm people don’t sit around all day waiting to drop in a zinger (“you, like, suck, man, ya know?”), instead, most of the communication happens slowly, over time (this conversation may last one or two days), and therefore ends up better thought out (in theory). It’s like 300 bps… but faster!

Comm it?
Kep!