Forum Dynamics

The plan is for me to stop visiting the three forums I've become enmeshed in. I don't really know how much success I will have but I can sure give it my best effort.

While I enjoy the people themselves, the flow of each place has really ebbed and quite frankly, I've traded in a lot of real life for the lure of cyberfriendship. Also, I am not sure how many, "I picked my nose five seconds ago." posts I am willing to waste time reading. Frankly, I can barely keep track of my own nose-picking that hearing about someone else's is, well, not that interesting.

Okay, so no one has posted about that in particular but it seems like a lot of the posts in these forums are centered around "regulars", who I think could offer meatier topics and sometimes do, but mostly, need an outlet for their daily frustrations or boredom avoidance. I am among that group and I won't lie about it. The comadre aspect that was so common in the small town I grew up in is not so common in the big cities. You find it where you can.

As long as people admit that what they are doing has no greater significance than it really does, I don't have a problem. "It is what it is." I'm talking about general topic forums mostly. The following is for those who think otherwise and want to say it is more meaningful and intellectual than it actually is:

Prime time and newspapers are geared to those at 8th grade level. Why not the web? Oh, wait, it is - in the forums. If they aren't actually at that age, they strive to act like it.

Forums don't breed discussion and there's a lot of virtual back-slapping for the person with the snappiest retort. Problem is, stupid is as stupid does and they can't tell a lame joke from a good one. Recycled jokes are like vomiting - food doesn't quite taste the same once masticated and regurgitated.

And they certainly don't want anyone around who might reveal them for what they are. Not something bad, just undeveloped. The fact that there exist people willing to discuss poses a big problem for those who don't. So they disguise their insecurity with 'zingers'.

Yep, everyone wants to be Bart Simpson but ends up more like Michael Jackson. "Because I'm bad, I'm bad, you know it. Ooo-oooh!" Doesn't matter how vocal you are, it's whether you back yo' shit up. Most of them can't.

The other part of this is the fear of change. I know many general forums where people have taken root and think this is equal to ownership. They will protect it at all costs, even death - of ideas or the forum itself. Eventually, anyone who might have made a real contribution will get bored with it and find a new distraction.

From Michael Crichton's "The Lost World":

"In ten thousand years, human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be non-adaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."

"Yes, why is that"

"Because it means the end of innovation...This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity."

The internet/web will create a homogenized society of ideas that lacks individuality and different viewpoints and will subsequently create a lack of adaptation to our natural surroundings. Inevitably, this will lead to our extinction.

Or as one of the young'uns on a general topic forum said, "It's dead in here."