I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet.
We met, what feels like a hundred years ago, on IRC. I’ve sat here, staring at that line, for several minutes, because I’m not sure what I want to say about IRC. It was the perfect chat network for me, an environment where I thrived, and I miss it.
The astute may say something to the effect of “but IRC’s still there!” Yeah. In the same way that Twitter’s still there. Technically. If you have no respect for yourself. Technology has a way of clinging to a horrifying half-life long after the point where any reasonable person has left. IRC’s still out there, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s inhabited almost exclusively by people who are pointedly refusing to accept that times change. Even though I, myself, think that the technologies that replaced it are generally worse, they’re still where the people are, and the people are the part that matters.
Making new friends as an adult is hard, in part, because time is precious. I am very rarely in situations where connection happens automatically. Think of primary school. It’s easy to make friends when you’re young and in school because you’re trapped in the same place with a group of people for long periods, going through the shared experience. Basically the only place that happens to an adult is work, and while it’s possible to make friends at work it’s not always the best place to do so. Depends an awful lot on where you work and what you do.
Social clubs once would have filled this niche, and probably still do for many. The elks, eagles, and most venerable moose are all different versions of an excuse for adults to hang out together. If you live somewhere with an active social club, my sense is that opportunity still exists. At least if TikTok is to be believed. TikTok would also like me to be very aware that Freemasonry exists. Thanks, TikTok. ThikTok.
One of the problems with a social club, assuming you could find one nearby, is that they frequently require you to be in a specific place at a specific time. I don’t know about you, but all of my weeknight evenings are already spoken for, with a long list of things I wish I had time for already jostling to find a spare moment to infest my day. I would need to radically reorient my life to make an evening free to go spend it with the IOOF. Maybe that’s still worth doing, at some point, but it’s a hard sell!
The internet, at its best, enables a sort of asynchronicity in communication. I can send you a message now, and you can reply to it later, and we can have a long, slow conversation that doesn’t require either of us to be bound to a specific place or time. Email did this, before the spammers made it unsafe to share your email. Forums did it, back before Google trained us out of surfing the web. In theory this is great, because I can make it fit whatever my schedule happens to be, and does not require large contiguous blocks of time like a social club.
Being a part of the IndieWeb is a little subversive, in a way. It’s staking a flag on the claim that the internet should be free. And a little bit weird. It’s a thing that we all build together, separately, in our own way. And sometimes it’s a little bit lonely. Being off the beaten path means fewer feet find their way to your digital garden. For better or worse. It’s IRC, sort of, in the sense that we’re all participating in the process of refusing to be part of the blessed path. It’s also a community, if you want it to be. And there’s connection, if you look for it. Certainly better than what’s left of the festering corpse of Twitter.
It’s not quite a social club, but it’s a start.