And don’t you forget it.
I spent a lot of time in the mid-to-late 90s on private communities like message boards and internet relay chat (IRC) rooms talking to the guys I played video games with. Every so often someone mentions IRC in something I encounter online and I start reminscing about those days, when the line between authenticity (our identity IRL) and anonymity (our persona online) was very cut and dry.
Even though our tiny gaming community has moved to a Google group, I still talk to most of those guys almost daily on a Google group. We rarely talk about video games, the original passion that brought us together. Instead, we discuss current events, pop culture, and our personal lives. We still call each other by our online alias even though many of us have met in real life. It’s pretty awesome and I’m thankful for it.
I can’t help but think about how many communities are out there on the world wide web that I might feel a sense of belonging to if I was given the chance to participate in them. These communities can exist in many different mediums: virtual worlds, games, message boards, listservs, Facebook groups, and chat rooms.
Whether it’s a group of gamers like my own or a bunch of furries, it’s these kinds of random communities, in the deepest, darkest corners of the web that make up what the internet is all about and we can’t let that disappear.