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Napster -- friend or foe?
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[03/25/00]

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By Farai Chideya

This place -- for me, this home away from home -- is rife with rules both written and unspoken, chief among them that there are no anonymous participants in our midst. Everything you say online, every gaseous burst of opinion, ribald joke, restaurant recommendation (immediately countered by a helpful/snide/witless/knowledgeable comment about a better place just down the street) is attributed to you by name. And archived. Let's not forget archived. There's nothing like coming across some old comment about the time your mom found the pink bunny vibrator you bought just like the girls on "Sex and the City" and trying to resist the urge to scribble.

Which brings us to jargon. Scribble (erase your old posts, except for the mark that they once existed -- a cyber stretchmark to show where text once lay); hide (lengthy text); bozofilter (the words of people you don't like today, who you might like tomorrow or next year or never); slip (in with a comment ahead of someone who is following the same train of thought). The Well is not real-time conversation, and bully to that! We inhabitants of the asylum allow our words to breathe, typing full-fledged treatises on the topic du jour without benefit of spellcheck or, sometimes, common sense and then -- if we reread our posts -- trying to resist the urge to scribble.

None of this really gets to the heart of why the Well matters, which is, of course, because the people do. It is a real community, certainly as real as Silicon Valley or the East Village or the Beltway, which are all constructs as well as bricks and concrete. When I first joined the Well, it wasn't because of a personal introduction. I got a trial subscription as a journalist. I'd already joined New York Online, which introduced me to the Net, MUDs and MOOs and geek picnics. But the Well kicked it up a notch.

Here, some of the pioneers of the Net (and top-notch writers, thinkers and sexologists) were the ones handing out the brain candy, and if you wanted to get in the mix you had to jump right in. I learned early on that someone is always there to bust your metaphorical balls, first 'cause you're a newbie, then just because.

Community, that unquantifiable essence, really does exist, right here, right now. There is an incredible loyalty -- an unthinkable loyalty -- that leads members of the Well, like me, to do things their momma told them not to do. Putting strangers up at my house is not among the stranger things. We love each other, we members of the Well do, sometimes physically, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes while spitting verbal venom like cobras across the ether.

You may be getting the feeling by now that the Well is not a Utopia. (They're overrated anyway.) My own burr-in-the-shorts is that this place is whiter than a blizzard in the Arctic. Sometimes I feel like I'm in that Saturday Night Live sketch, "That Black Girl."

At first, I used to tilt at every windmill, get into every race fight that came along. But now I pick my battles, same as everywhere, and enjoy the fun. Like watching one (apparently mediocre) article on Silicon Alley mushroom into a 150-post explosion of disdain, defensiveness, loyalty, graciousness and dot-com defenestration. Like getting great recommendations for the best breakbeat tunes, instant literary references, job tips and tech advice. Like making new friends, true friends, and following them out into the desert to a space where, for once, we can disconnect our electronic umbilical cords.

So who are we, those who live among the Well at 15? Talk to one Well devotee and he'll tell you the place is full of soft-headed bleeding-heart liberals; speak to another and she'll complain about the smug prattle of libertarians and shoot-from-the-hip conservatives. The reality is that we're a bunch of bleedin' bigmouths. All you have to do to be here is listen, think and talk. (Remember that middle one, if you please.)

About the writer
Farai Chideya, the author of "The Color of Our Future" (William Morrow), just launched a political column via the Los Angeles Times Syndicate which you can also find at Pop+Politics.

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