Sonny, come here. That's right, sonny, sit down right there by my rocker. Now let me tell you a story...
Back in my day, sonny, we didn't use these fancy internets to create strange online communities of friends you never saw face-to-face. We did it the hard way, boy!
We had Apple ][ computers, sonny, with 300 baud modems. You had to know your Hayes AT command set back in those days.
I could whistle at 300 baud. Had to. Faster to redial by hand when the line was busy, and then whistle to keep the remote machine online while you got your modem to pick up. Those were the days, sonny.
We didn't have these fancy blogs or chat rooms, sonny boy. None of that. We called them BBSs. Most of them were just like your little DailyKos, except only one person could read it at a time. 'Cause the host only had one phone line, you see!
There weren't threaded comments or recommended diaries. None of that, sonny. Sure, some of the fancier BBSs had what they called "forums," areas dedicated to posts on a single topic. But a lot of them, you just dialed in and posted whatever you wanted to.
And remember, sonny, these weren't national or international boards! These were just your neighbors, folks in the next town over, all people in your local calling area. None of this "perspectives from abroad" that you like so much. None of that, sonny.
Why, I remember the first time I typed with someone in another part of the country. There was a board called D-Dial, that's Diversi-Dial, sonny. Up to 7 people could call in at once and type to each other, like those chatrooms you've got now. Couldn't have more, because the Apple only had slots for 6 modem cards in the back. Plus the sysop typing on the keyboard.
Sysop? Oh, sonny. Learn your history boy! You'd call it a "front page poster" today, I guess. Kos is your sysop.
Well, the DDial software was running on people's machines all around the country, each in their own town, and with their own users. Now and then they'd have two hosts call each other, so users dialing in to the machine in Boston could talk to the ones who'd dialed in to the machine in Cleveland, or whatever.
It was amazing, sonny! Communicating on the keyboard in real time with people so far away! Realizing that just like I had my local computer friends, there were little communities like us all around the country. We even each had our own "accents," our own slang - what we called a m0e, they'd call something else completely.
If we ever make contact with life on another planet, sonny boy, it will be just like that feeling.
You kids today, you take it all for granted. It wasn't so easy, boy! Someone had to be there in the mid-80s, sitting at the keyboard late at night, developing online communities. You think your culture just sprang up when DailyKos went online?
Learn your history boy! Those folks were running BBSs on the kind processing power you've got in your sneakers, sonny... they were the pioneers.
Sonny, they were the Great Generation.