Back When I Was Someone Else

Usenet.



Remember when this was relevant? Remember when you had to go find the correct group for your interest or else you were flamed out of the wrong one you posted in? Those were the days, huh? Seriously, it was so much better than the current state of online interaction. Back then, you talked about anime in general with one group, specific anime with another (and many of those folks ONLY talked abut that particular anime), and you could even talk about cosplay and modeling in those respective groups. Want to talk about your specific model of car? Go find it. It wasn't just ONE BIG ROOM (as it has been described to me) like Facebook, it was a giant convention with all the different rooms available for discussions with people you just might come to know over time.



It was a very different world back then.


You built communities based on the culture of the group, and every group had a different feel. The best ones were well-moderated and policed by group members, those few off-topic posts were gently nudged as being inappropriate, and there was always the FAQ cop, ready to throw a link out to ANY offending member. It was brilliant.


Rec.art.anime.models was one of my haunts, and it was a good place to hang out and swap info, opinions, thoughts, new projects, etc. There were other groups I ran in, and each one consumed much of my time online. Conversations were held in semi-real-time, with a response coming either a few seconds (if you were both actively refreshing the feed) or a few days (life actually got in the way back then). Today, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have taken all the waiting away, and with it our understanding of patience. Posting a binary to the group (a picture, say) was pretty straightforward (UUEncode, anyone?), but today a picture is just an MMS away.  We built communities then, not just friend lists.


There was a lot more to getting to know someone than just lurking on their FB page or scrolling through their other social media links. You had to strike up a conversation, sometimes you could discover that someone you interacted with every day lived right around the corner, or halfway around the world. There was no sending of friend requests, you had to interact with them, and there was no public acknowledgement that you were friends with them, other than your inclusion in the same news group. As I write this, I am considering how large my friends list on FB is, and exactly how few of them I actually interact with just because of the sheer number of them. It's not that I wouldn't interact with them all (hell, either they or I sent a friend request, right?), it's that there aren't enough hours in the damned year to.  Back in the day, you popped into a newsgroup and checked the latest posts. You might do this for several dozen groups, but in slow ones, there might only be 4 or 5 new headers. In busy ones, there might be upwards of 1000, but rarely were there more than a handful that were of interest to you. Threads seemed easier to manage, too.


But time marches on, and Usenet is gone. Modern social media beckons with instant response, self-gratification, and the allure of being famous in your circles. I use it to distribute this blog, and I'm okay with that, but the idea of patience is history. Everything today is so much faster, and the thought of waiting to hear someone else's opinion (tomorrow) seems almost implausible.


I'll revisit this sooner or later. I'll run through the Google Archive of Usenet groups and find some old stuff ("Chaos Returned" or perhaps "Fish219" if you care). Maybe I'll even check Facebook and see if anyone I use to know is there.


I'll let you know. Stay tuned.