{"id":627,"date":"2006-09-22T09:56:41","date_gmt":"2006-09-22T09:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/22\/do-you-ever-miss-the-days-when\/"},"modified":"2006-09-22T09:56:41","modified_gmt":"2006-09-22T09:56:41","slug":"do-you-ever-miss-the-days-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/22\/do-you-ever-miss-the-days-when\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Ever Miss the Days When You Used to Be Nostalgic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Jo Walton<\/a>, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I’ve strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven’t really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed, whether Usenet has died a little for me. But I’m sitting here, trying to capture how I feel about newsgroups and the communities in them, how I feel when I post, what threads I participate in, and… there’s That Hierarchy, there’s a sense of attachment to the technology and to a bunch of technical newsgroups, and there’s some combination of dogged persistence and obligation attached to news.groups. But… friends, connections, common causes, play, passion for a cause… that all used to be there, that’s all in those old messages, and where did that all go? Did I change, did it change, what happened? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

I remember the stress too. I remember getting so angry I couldn’t see straight, I remember losing hours to trying to salvage some thread that I started with some idiotic half-baked comment, I remembered seriously burning out a few times on trying to get through to people. And then every once in a while, I would just nail it… I’d manage to write something that just captured a moment, that just rang in my head like a bell, and when I posted something like that, there were people to echo it, there was e-mail from people who I respected more than I ever expressed saying “good job,” and the messages wouldn’t just be about the future authentication strategy or how to balance AFS servers or even about my opinion on some random book. They’d be part of a discussion, about hopes and dreams and politics and religion and belief, that dug down into the meat of what other people believed, that came off my fingers raw and contradictory and impassioned, and they weren’t like everything else I did. <\/p>\n

Now, when I post something controversial, I’m worrying afterwards about whether it’s just going to start a long thread that I’ll feel obligated to respond to and produce a lot of stress. I think about how to extract myself from pointless debates. I worry about energy levels. I write much more reasonable stuff, but you know, I also don’t write about the same sort of thing any more. I wrote a response to Dave Hayes about community ownership and responsibility intermixed with the words of a Toad the Wet Sprocket song. I can’t remember the last time that doing something like that even occurred to me. <\/p>\n

Did I just change? Or did something change about the environment that would helped me write like that, feel like that?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I get nostalgic about different groups than Russ does, but the basic experience is the same. I was heavily involved in a couple of Usenet groups all through grad school (1993-1999), but drifted away from it in 2001 in favor of blogs and, you know, gainful employment as a college professor. For six or seven years, though, it was a defining element of my life. I met my wife through Usenet (should’ve mentioned that in the nerd-off, I guess…), I made a lot of friends through Usenet, I flew across the country to meet peope I knew through Usenet.<\/p>\n

And yet, when I upgraded my computer a couple of summers ago, I didn’t even install a newsreader. The last time I looked in at my old stomping grounds was shortly after Septermber 11, 2001, when I checked in just to see how people were doing, and I stopped reading again a few weeks later. <\/p>\n

Blogging scratches the same “bloviating on the Internet” itch that Usenet used to, but Russ is absolutely right that the sense of community isn’t there. You can find pockets of that sort of thing– the comment threads at Making Light are about as close as I’ve seen to the best of Usenet– but I’m not really part of it any more. I don’t have the time to keep up with the handful of comments posted at my own site, let alone maintain the level of interaction needed to fit in there.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure about the exact cause– some linear combination of my getting a real job, and the community evolving away from where it used to be– but whatever I had with Usenet is gone. I miss it sometimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Jo Walton, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet: I’ve strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven’t really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed,… Continue reading Do You Ever Miss the Days When You Used to Be Nostalgic?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}