letters
to an unknown audience
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~
The Acceptance of My People/  /November 14, 2002
Somewhere about age eleven, I went to a meeting of the local Commodore users' group and met a sort of idol of mine: Brother Webster. By that time several lengthy discussions about a variety of topics had already passed between Brother Webster and myself, but this was the first time I would meet him face-to-face. Bro Web was the sysop of a BBS called, I think, The Farm, and it was my favorite of all of the Rochester BBSes. It was active, it had no "adult" content (a boon to my Puritanical eleven-year-old mind), and it had the "chat with sysop" feature that I hunted for in a BBS. Even more valuable, the sysop was always around (retired?), and if I was bored I could count on a chat with him.

He was a kindly guy of about sixty and he liked the idea of being a mentor to me. I liked it too. This was long before anyone had heard of the Net's empowering effect for pedophiles, and for that matter it was long before I had ever heard of pedophiles. Let me be frank: this was long before I had ever heard of sex.

So the first time I found myself typing with a stranger at the other end of a phone line was like the moment in Tron when they get sucked into the computer's world—a shockingly unfamiliar experience—but I soon realized that on a sysop chat, nobody knew that I was a dog. It was incredibly liberating for the introverted, melancholy me—liberating in the ways that are already well-documented: it was permission to speak without the blundering consequences, without the chance for any "Ezra" to be discounted. Anonymity allowed me to explore my identity, which then allowed me to come out of my personal closet. Subtle, eh?

Chatting, IMing, and MUDding have become such peculiar phenomena, haven't they?—peculiar that they've been adopted by so many people who aren't interested in machines: people who really just want to talk to strangers. Wouldn't you expect our culture would have a more straightforward reaction to it, either for oor against? The telephone was picked up easily, and email too. Chatting is more ambiguous: there's a stigma about techies, and at the same time there's a fascination with it. Chatting is almost like S & M in that it's seen as a kind of fetish, but I think it's more popular and acceptable than S & M.

I long ago lost interest in the slow pace, the unimaginative characters, and the limited idiolect of chatting (ranging from short, elliptical sentences to perplexing smileys, and no further). And yet the medium (if I may give it so dignified a term) enters a rennaisance: gay men have a lively culture of IMing, Luddite authors write about e(-mail)pistolary romances, and I recently saw a play, in a professional repertory theatre, in which perhaps half of the dialogue took place over IM (theatrically rendered, of course). Chatting has entered the cultural mainstream. How is this possible? What does it mean?

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