What the hell is the internet anyway? Part 2

Later, from about 12 through 16, I became heavily involved in what may be the most esoteric hobby possible and, equally or even more so, in an online community auspiciously devoted to it. Brickfilms.com, then a growing and active repository of Lego stop motion films and a forum for hobbyists of all ages, was frequented by maybe a few hundred or so aspiring directors from nearly the world over. Then at the critical size of maybe 30-100 very actively communicating contributors, it was a community as bona fide as any I've encountered.

Lego-based stop motion films are a topic for another reflection (although the parallels with experimental optics are so vivid as to make that reflection a likely one). Brickfilms.com was, at the time, as much a social entity as it was a topical discussion forum. In particular, the chat room which became an attached feature of the discussion board became a regular hang-out for many forum members, more than a few who had all but given up (in some cases before even starting) on actually participating in the hobby. For all its peculiarities it is, in retrospect, remarkable how very close to "real life" it was, how for those 3-5 crucial years of my life Brickfilms.com was, in a undeniable way, my de facto home on the internet and how the apparently radical differences between an internet forum and any other social vehicle were really, pretty minor.

Many brickfilms went far beyond this level of sophistication, though an equal number followed the lower road

On one hand, there was all manner of usual adolescent ribaldry (tempered, but less than you'd imagine, by the overwhelming fraction of the community which was evangelically homeschooled), with many discussions of girls and other decidedly non-Lego-movie topics. On the other was Brickfilms' diversity of ages and origins, a harmony of individuals that may have never been possible in a pre-internet age. And for all the darkness and baseness of the internet, it is this that actually serves as among the best evidence for the more-or-less goodness of people. There were as many adults actively participating in the community, both socially and as filmmakers, as teenagers (not to mention actual children). To be sure, there were many possibly single or at least childless men, ages 20-50, who were playing with Lego and who were also shooting the breeze with teenagers in a way that was, in retrospect, both admirably patient and cognizant. While no doubt much of the misanthrope-fuel of the internet is driven by a small number of participants, it is probably as much the anonymity that pushes the content to the top. Here was a community with a size where anonymity essentially vanished in lieu of actualized online identities. Reddit has, in a much more contrived but probably sincere way, attempted to reproduce this and has had some success (the relative ease with which one can slip into an anonymous account, fully separated from any established identity, is one weakness). Nonetheless, I think it is not a unique experience to become engaged in an online community with a diversity that seems to defy societal norms and yet functions in a ,well, functional way. Somehow, people from a staggering number of countries, of a large range of ages and with some obviously stark differences in philosophy, all carried on in a way with only the most trivial of conflicts. While Brickfilms.com may be a bit of a rarity, online role playing games seem to actively aim to foster this kind of interaction.

Around this time, my friends in the "real world" were becoming excited about the coming of World of Warcraft. Driven mostly by their enthusiasm and less by my own, I agreed to be a shaman or druid without much complaint and, by then feeling some historical significance to it all, joined them in the first open beta release of the game. Although I persisted for several months, dutifully and somewhat reluctantly playing the role of the healer in our adventures, I spent the majority of my playing time in WoW with my friends and, while the economy and, as the game was revised, increasing ease of interaction with others was fascinating, I eventually retired my account. My friends carried on the drive, however, and would appear to have become engaged in a community not unlike the one I experienced with Brickfilms (albeit less diverse at the time). For all the deserving criticisms WoW has accumulated since its debut, it also contains some of the purest goodness of the internet. In guilds, it has one of the most powerful mechanisms for fostering cross-cultural, cross-class friendships within organized communities with definite online identities and at a size where these identities have actual meaning (i.e., typically well below 100 to less than 10). It is hard to defensibly wax romantic about a game that I not only did not like, but which has since garnered as much hate as love. But to say it is one of the most powerful new objects to enter the internet cannon is possibly understating its significance.

Eventually, two other juggernauts became apparent. The first, Wikipedia, worked its way into my psyche around the same time the myspace craze was spreading amongst my peers. Myspace, being perhaps more open and increasingly spam-ridden, gave way to Facebook, an auspiciously cleaner and closed alternative.

My criticisms of Wikipedia could fill another post this size and even then only in summary form. Its very interconnectedness, scope and ease of use are also its greatest weaknesses. Its quality drops off exponentially as one leaves the central mass of carefully-pruned common knowledge. With every fault being amplified several fold as one moves outwards through the layers of specialization, Wikipedia can quickly become a frustrating and embarrassing mess. But even the most particular and narrow Wikipedia article has generally been written, if not coherently and if not with any particular mind to pedagogy or a logical structure, with some genuine enthusiasm and care. The external links and references, while a minefield of their own, often riddled with the whims of a particular self-interested party (usually one can make a clear guess as to the institutional affiliation of the primary author by a cursory glance of the references and external links), are often a entranceway into a much more useful source. But my early years with Wikipedia had all the unfiltered love of a young romance and as much as her disgusting quirks irritate me now, Wikipedia is the greatest website in existence. It is among the pillars of the internet and on almost pure knowledge alone. For casual (i.e., non-contributing) users, Wikipedia employs only the cheap trick of being an easy and enormous wealth of knowledge. Except perhaps in the most perverted magnification, Wikipedia is a rare internet entity that is nothing if not a sturdy thrust away from misanthropy.

Facebook is more divisive and more pervasive and, for the majority of internet users, is probably the closest thing to the de facto e-community I reminisced about above. Whether or not Facebook has been constructed and evolved in a calculating way or has simply been the organic following-ones-nose it appears to be, it is an almost enigmatically functional collection of features and interconnectedness that seem to really dig into the fibre of social fabric in a way that seems extraordinarily visceral. I wish I could say more about Facebook, especially because it probably represents the starting point for most new internet users, but it blurs the line too much between the online and offline world for me to feel entirely comfortable with it. Entirely online interactions and interpersonal relationships have a framework of manners and a protocol which is probably some combination of ad libbed, inheritance from offline interaction and e-necessary adaptations. On Facebook, the online and offline expectations and etiquette are fused in an unpredictable and haphazard way. Facebook is World of Warcraft but with the "game" replaced by the offline world and with the veil of anonymity and fantasy replaced by a more-or-less e-representation of ones actual self. Add to this that Facebook stretches long-dead personal relationships into an uncomfortable and almost surreal length and intimacy. Having participated in both, I find Facebook much more jarring, more intrinsically challenging, weird and unsettling.

But as an experiment in removing one crucial aspect of the internet, anonymity, from the equation, Facebook is worth reflecting on. Probably my earliest motivations to join were the usual ones. It is striking how quickly it became impolite to not be a friend-able member of the site. Very soon, my peers became a bit suspicious of anyone who was not available for scrutinization on the website.  Whether my life has been improved by it or not, I can at least agree that it is now not unreasonable to expect to be able to "check someone's social credentials".

On the one hand, the removal of full-on anonymity would apparently remove some of the darkest layers of the internet. But just as anonymity makes it easier to do wrong it makes it excruciatingly hard to be nice -particularly in the increasingly prey-mentality, psycho-phobic culture that has emerged in the internet era.  Some of the most unadulterated acts of kindness I have ever experienced were through the supreme anonymity of the internet. Even in WoW, where one has a quasi-identity, true kindness is much easier to give and receive. As much as I once hoped the slightly increased distance Facebook adds to any interaction might make politeness, kindness and compassion easier to implement, it seems to actually amplify the suspicious and awkward response these tend to receive in the offline world. In WoW, I found the world is a bit simpler and the threats and hysteria are so much further from actuality. Even if an act of kindness is "perpetrated" with ulterior motives, the worst consequences of those motives are so relatively minor that the impediment to just accepting kindness is markedly lessened. It is just as markedly easier to be make that act. And while it is similarly easier to be nasty and inconsiderate, it is just as markedly easier to flippantly move on without much offence. On Facebook, not only are most potential acts of kindness bound to be in the public record, for all to scrutinize and make judgements on, but they are in an arena which is perhaps even more full of caution and where the apparent ultimate consequences of any ulterior motive seem far more real. It is much easier to be kind for its own sake with other men (or presumably, with other women), but my experiments with this have ended badly with enough frequency to make me reluctant to continue. Most relatives are all pretty safe bets: Facebook is great in this respect. Overt kindness of any sort to the opposite sex within some range of your own age is very difficult. How precisely something is wrongly interpreted no doubt varies depending on the attractiveness of the parties involved but it seems rare that any exchange can just be kindness for its own sake. Offline, body language and intonation can be used to make a compliment or favour just "nice" instead of "creepy". On Facebook, creepy and nice intonations are practically indistinguishable. In all, Facebook essentially represents the internet with a bandpass filter: most of the worst of the internet is removed but most of the best is dampened equally.

So the internet is a supermarket for everything you can't find at a supermarket and where potato chips are pornography, profanity and piracy. It is a masked city on fast-forward and society on speed. It is a great throbbing mass of e-humanity with enough darkness to convert any rosy-eyed child into a raging misanthrope. But at all levels it contains a constant reassurance of the goodness of people,  even juxtaposed with the most stomach-churning gore, hate and ignorance we as a species can produce. It is just a hypothesis to be revealed true or false by a careful examination of a supermarket's balance sheet, but it may just be the case that to bring in the broccoli and blueberries, the grocer need to keep pushing the candy and potato chips.