15 April 2002 - 17:51

When we left our heroine, she (I) was about to embark on a journey into the Virtual.

Spring 1995. Jade's boyfriend at the time ran a little BBS which I joined at her behest. I saw. I liked. I looked up some other BBSes and joined two or three of them (many others were defunct). I remain active on about four of them, local, single-line affairs with a primarily high-school aged userbase. I played LORD, posted poetry, and engaged in slow but heated debates. This took up between 0.5 - 2 hours of my time every morning.

Towards the end of August I joined a board known as Orca's Ocean II. I was very impressed with the organization of the board and the frequency, articulation, and range of posting. I was especially impressed with the SysOp, Orca (aka Turquoise Dolphin), who was very involved in keeping things running well, was funny, well-written, knew a lot about computers, and wrote great poetry. He also liked dolphins a lot, but that's another story.

We started talking on the BBS every night, for roughly 4 hour stretches. As it was single-line, this irritated the other users, but we didn't much care. The BBS ran WWIV, and we talked on WWIV chat with ANSI turned on.

Two people. One window. It's night--work is over, family is asleep, lights are out. Black screen, grey mono-spaced text. A purple ==== divider line separated the screen. Orca's text appeared in the top half, Eclipse's in the bottom half. Keystrokes were transmitted as they were pressed, as opposed to the one-line-at-a-time-transmitted-with-[return]-stroke system used by MU*s, IM programs, and IRC.

Local phone line connection. No lag.

This remains my ideal for on-line communication. There is a sort of purity to those circumstances. It contributes something to the communication that can't entirely be achieved otherwise.

On the other hand, I was in love. That made a big difference. We were also both geeks (well, I think Orca deserves to be called a hacker) in love with computers and the possibilities they provided. We were also both very fast typists (80-90+ wpm), very good writers, and given over to fantasy.

So I was totally involved. It was, at its best, like being immersed in a great novel. Only I wasn't just watching, I was participating. That situation remains an archetype and ideal in the depths of my mind. I talked about this last year in a blog entry proposing an on-line involvement rating system.

Then came the Delphi account. I was introduced to internet e-mail, mailing lists, and usenet. Then came the Prodigy trial period. I was introduced to the graphical World Wide Web (and it was still pretty young in 1995). That was when I began amassing my list of dolphin related links that I still groom to this day. Then finally, the modern-day style ISP, from which Orca eventually introduced me to MU*s and I figured out IRC.

I had been fantasizing about the on-line world for at least two years before I joined in. What's most surprising, ultimately, is that I wasn't disappointed by the reality of the Internet (remember when people used to capitalize that word all the time? Remember?). In fact, I remained entranced.

In 1997, Turquoise Dolphin (Orca) left for college. We had been talking on the 'net sometimes, for the sake of exploring FurryMUCK and spending time with mutual friends there, but this forced a solid transition. Now I spent my nights on FurryMUCK, and naturally also on the web, e-mail, newsgroups, IRC...it's hard to resist distractions on line, since anything and everything is so accessible. And sometimes FurryMUCK lagged, or did one of its database saves (they took about 20 minutes there, it being a big place), and I'd get bored and my attention would wander. There were other people to talk to, even just on Furry. So basically, there was a lot of noise--lag, other stuff happening, other people talking, line-by-line vs. letter-by-letter discourse. It did lose that purity of two people typing.

What we gained, was, well, the use of all that noise. We could e-mail each other .wav files of our voices, put up webpages for each other. We could give our overactive imaginations a break and spend sometime exploring other people's fantasy lands frozen in text and time, just by wandering through the MUCK. We could reference webpages to each other, put up files for each other. And we could hang out with other people. Before long there was a whole motley social group that I spent a lot of time with on line on a daily basis. On FurryMUCK there were Khith and Flit and Doc_C and most of all, Thermoriax Technodragon. On #dolphin and POD there were a variety of dolphin-touched folks that I fell in and out of touch with--of them, only Dauphie remains someone I know reasonably well. And on IRC, on #nbtsc (which eventually got its very own server, our beloved Paradoxical) and on the nbtsc-listserv, there were my friends from Not Back To School Camp. Platypus, Polyergic, subtext, Ari, et al.

Where am I going with this? Well, I spent a lot of time on-line socializing, chatting, mostly on IRC and FurryMUCK which afford rooms with conversations between multiple people and also private person to person chat. This time comprised several hours every night, after I'd taken a shower and the family had gone to bed. No RL distractions except the increasing lateness of the hour. Even that wasn't a big deal, since it's not like I had to go to school in the morning or anything. My on-line personas, friendships, romances, creations, fantasies were important parts of my life and self image.

When I came to college, I really left that behind. It was a lot like growing up and leaving a place.

That's not to say I don't spend a lot of time "on line." Hopefully you readers have noticed by now that I'm not simply talking about spending time jacked-in receiving data; I'm talking about spending time jacked-in and interacting, communicating, socializing.

I love being able to explore real-life places and hang out with real-life friends. But these past few months I've been spending more time being actively on-line. And I'm glad. A revolution did take place, and is still taking place. The internet is something still new and widely full of potential. I want to go back to being a part of that. I want to try and go home again.

For now, I will say that I think on line arenas need to be considered far more widely in academia. I think linguistics and various divisions of psychology (including social, developmental, and environmental psychology... possibly clinical, and decidedly human-factors) could clearly benefit from looking at social interaction across various on-line media. How do different environments and *potential* audiances contribute to what is written and how? What features does real-time chatting have in common with speech, and what with traditional writting? (I wrote a short paper on that topic, entitled Actions that Aren't for Language, Culture and Society.) There's years and years of research just in those areas, and they're just the beginning. Honestly, not much is being done.

Also, I'd like to see a club or society, a small one, of people who explored on-line realms together in pairs or small groups. I would personally love a travel companion (E-mail me!) for this sort of thing. Experiences would be written up and posted; the group would have a group blog. That sort of travelogue reporting about the internet used to be much more popular before everyone was wired (see The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold)... I think it still has a place.

And with these thoughts, I must sign off. First, Heph-style, I will leave you with a music recommendation. A Million Watts of Love by Information Society.