The Changing of the Guard

A personal view by Jerry Han

I still don't know what to call it. It was a community, but it wasn't. It was home, but it wasn't that either. It was a land of handles, and messages, and discussions. I remember one discussion on World War II that must have gone on for at least two months. Our interests were different, our personalities were different, but we all had one thing in common. "Southern Reaches."

"Southern Reaches" disappeared at the end of that Summer, as the Sysop moved on to University. But I was hooked. I later changed venue to a different BBS in Windsor, known as Somewhere in Time. That is where I spent the remainder of my online time in Windsor, playing on-line games, getting into arguments, and, eventually, playing the role of Secretary-General in a model United Nations we had setup at the time. Our discussions covered vast areas, from history to science to physics to TV to popular literature to current events and back again. It was a time of growth for me, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually, and that BBS left a mark on my psyche.

However, like all things, time forces us to move on. I moved to Waterloo to attend classes at the University of Waterloo in the Fall of 1992. Somewhere in Time disappeared in 1993, a victim of the Sysop not having enough time to run the BBS anymore. The crowd that gathered for those years in Windsor scattered to the four winds, having been called to other cities, other ways of life.

At University, I discovered the Net, and tried to recreate some of the magic that I had during those years in Windsor. Sad to say, it was impossible. The groups were too large, the noise ratio too high, and I have withdrawn from Net life and become something that I had previously held in a mild form of contempt: a lurker.

Not too interesting, I guess. Yet, it highlights a very important point; a point that the mainstream press seem to have missed in their hyping of the Internet. There was a cyberculture as far back as 1989, and, I'm sure, there was a cyberculture back even before then. Of that time before, I can't speak of first hand, but you can get a feel for it by looking through the early RFC's of the Alternet, the precursor to the Internet. [1]

This, of course, begs the question "What is Cyberculture?" The Random House Dictionary describes culture as: "a particular form or stage of civilization." [2] Thus, the implication is clear. "Cyberculture" is the computer form of civilization; it is the part of civilization that uses computers on a regular basis.

This culture has grown and expanded as use of the computer has grown and expanded over the past twenty years, since the introduction of the Altair in 1976. But like all cultures, it reflects the members that it embodies. Early "cyberculture" was based on the white male computer engineer stereotype, because those were the people who used the computers. In the early to late 80s, the stereotype shifted slightly, to the younger generation being weaned on Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and Atari 800s. My dominant years in Cyberspace were run on IBM PCs and Apple Macintoshes and Commodore Amigas, the last years before the Net (or computer communication in general) was overwhelmed by the mainstream public.

During my time as a BBS user, and early Net user, the culture was of an intelligent gathering of men and women, discussing everything about us. Even with people that I had nothing in common with, there always appeared to be a common understanding. There were heated arguments, but no flames. Even in the heated arguments, however, there was a measure of respect; an underlying current of "I think you're wrong, but we'll still play Global War together after I finish this rant." You could name all the people you would most likely reply to. There was no advertising, no scams, no spams, no junk e-mail. There was an innocence about it, or a sophistication, or an aura of escape and saftey: something undefineable we knew couldn't last but we hoped would last forever. Maybe it was just simply the illusion of youth.

Whatever it was, it isn't what we have today. Today, the "cyberculture" is merely a variant of modern culture, modern trends, modern ideas. Advertising and market forces have made the Internet a gigantic bazaar, "cyberculture" merely another buzz word. With the rapid development and deployment of the World Wide Web, everybody is posting information, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. Games are a big part of the Internet scene, as are newsgroups for every different taste, e- mail lists covering every subject from computers to cross-stitch, and, of course, the dominating World Wide Web. You can, or soon will be able to, get everything you ever want or need on the Net. It has become a giant computer-enhanced testimony to anarchy and chaos. Information overload at its extreme, the corrupting power of money taken to its highest form. Net life is transitory, fleeting, and this days fad is next days old news.

In this bazaar atmosphere we see the death of the innocence, of the sophistication. There is a very strong sense of "anything goes" in this new culture, as in modern life. We see flame wars at their full intensity. We see the advertising, the spams, the e-mail junk, the sensationalism. We see a lack of respect out in the Net in general. We see a culture that is nothing like the culture I remember, except in the bastions where people have held the walls against the public onslaught. Yet, even these bastions have come under attack as well. There is only so much time a moderator has, only so much bandwidth and space a system can spare. If the public demands too much of it, then it disappears, a victim of its own popularity. Indeed, by forming a bastion, the moderator must defeat the original purpose of rational, open discourse; by admitting to moderation, a group admits that there are people in the group who can't handle the responsibility of being reasonable. [3]

Thus, we come to the utter irony of it all. As the mainstream press cries that "cyberculture" is the new exciting way to go, we realize that it's actually old now. The public, in its mass adoption of "cyberculture", has merely trampled over it, and turned it into an offshoot of the mainstream culture we have now. In their attempt to brace the new and exciting, they have made it old, and worn, and have brought both the virtues and vices of modern society and imprinted them on cyberculture.

The bugle has sounded the changing of the guard; the people who remember the way it was are being replaced by those who know how they want it to be. And, in the swap, something that was very special is being replaced with something very ordinary.

[2] The Random House Dictionary , Ballantine Books, 1980, New York

[3] A good sign of this is the Bungle Affair, related to us in the essay Taboo, Consensus and the Challenge of Democracy in an Electronic Forum out of Computerization and Controversy , 2nd ed., ed. by Rob Kling, Academic Press, 1996. The Bungle Affair, would never have happened on the BBSing scene in Windsor. It probably would have happened eventually, but as an example of the modern "decay" that the mainstream is bringing into the system. It is also of interest to note that the "Wizards", the people in charge of the MOO, had withdrawn from dealing with arguments and other ethical problems, and concentrated on running the MOO itself. In "old" cyberculture, they never would have had to get stuck in the middle in the first place. I can think of one time when somebody stepped WAY out of line, and the Sysop had to delete his account. We later found out it was a twelve-year old with delusions of Godhood. Somethings never change. (8-)

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