Remember ICQ? Back in the day it was the chat program of choice. I used to spend all evening online, IRC open in two separate windows, ICQ docked on the right with its private conversations popping up in little boxes. Aside from the convenience of its features, it was just such an endearing program—the red flower icon turning green at connection, the quaintly chosen phonetic acronym, the ”Uh-oh!” sound effect that signaled a new message arriving. You know the one? If you have ever used ICQ, you’re hearing it in your head right now, I guarantee it.
Whoever came up with that sound must have been downright clairvoyant.
My chatting habits back then had a reasonable origin: my best friends were all long-distance and I usually only got to see them every few weeks. Among them was my first boyfriend, whom I called by his real name but recognized online as “Ummm”. We complained about the distance between us, of course, but it wasn’t so bad. We had gotten to know each other over the internet anyway; it was the real-world meetings with him that felt strange and awkward.
Ummm and I lasted for about eight months, during which we annoyed all of our friends with our embarrassing e-PDA (in retrospect, an asterik does not look like a mouth puckered for a kiss), and then we had a mutual break-up (really, such things happen) and thereafter annoyed all of our friends by snarking at and about each other all over the internet. With that experience under my belt, I almost immediately decided to do it again.
Here, I thought, was the real catch: mrCucumber. He had been my crush before Ummm, and I’ll be honest, it had never really gone away. And now he liked me back! He was gonna be my boyfriend! I was gonna chat all night with him!
Well, you know where this is headed. We saw each other in person maybe once after we became official. It was strange and awkward, which I obstinately refused to acknowledge. I was mad about him. I got online one night, and...
Uh-oh!
He wanted to talk about us. He was having trouble thinking of me “like that” and something didn’t feel right about being together.
Uh-oh!
He wanted out, though he still wanted to be friends and hoped things weren’t going to be weird between us.
Uh-oh!
He felt really bad about bringing it up this way but he didn’t have the nerve to call or wait to see me in person again.
Ever had one of those moments where you’re just staring at your monitor, hands frozen over ASDF and JKL;, wondering how long of a grace period you get for your response time before they think you’re AFK? It’s really not at all the same as being struck dumb by words coming out of human lips. Your mind might think you’re talking to someone, but your body knows when you’re alone.
The bastard had just broken up with me.
Over ICQ.
The ICQ part didn’t really register at the time, of course, because the bastard had just broken up with me, and the worst part (this is always the worst part) was that he wasn’t a bastard, he was kind and smart and strong and funny and those eyes, that smile, that hair, he was perfect. I was sure we were meant for each other. The evidence was right there - the name mrCucumber was an inside joke that I had bestowed on him myself, months before, in the real world. (I know how it sounds, but believe it or not, there was nothing dirty about its origins. We had just seen Dark City.)
A closer examination (but go easy on me, it was my first broken heart) might have shown that the evidence didn’t point where I thought it did. An inside joke? My own screenname was the same everywhere: Psyche. It wasn’t a funny name, it was beautiful and dramatic and full of personal meaning. It was the identity of the person I wanted to be.
For someone like mrCucumber, the internet was a way to communicate with long-distance friends; for me, it was a territory and I was a citizen. I was immersed in net culture before I knew it existed.
It would have been easy to identify my countrymen, if I had thought to do so. We were the ones who explored sites catering to our agonizingly niche interests, and there made friends - lasting friends, in many cases—with people whose faces we never saw. We filled out profiles and answered memes (“surveys”, back then). We used the standard acronyms and sometimes invented our own, but we spoke in full sentences with passable grammar. As programs and social networks evolved, so did we, embracing or rejecting each new trend according to our arbitrary but hotly defended preferences.
We’re still here today, comfortable in whatever online dens we’ve scratched out for ourselves, typing with the blinding speed we developed over years of real-time chat. Long-term exposure has decreased our sensitivity to drama and heightened our ability to identify an interesting point of view and follow it to more of the same. It isn’t practice that shaped us into net citizens, though; we started out that way. It’s just automatic: one kid, when put in front of a computer, will check his Facebook page for updates and occasionally buy something from eBay. One will create accounts at Fanfiction.net, deviantArt, a hidden forum for SCA-involved ferret owners, and five different blogging sites, stamping all of them with her trademark image (not a photo of herself, of course), and her pervasive and unique screenname (WeaselContessa, in all likelihood).
It’s not a given that we’ll all get along. Actually, I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to say that, because if there’s one given about net culture, it’s that we won’t all get along. We do form tight bonds, but when we clash, we clash hard. I’m sure many of us would like to ignore the fact that we all have something big in common, but I’m taking a gamble that anyone who has gone so far as to read this is willing to accept it: all of us have intuitively understood cyberspace as a dimension in which we can freely establish and exercise a significant part of our identities. It’s not a universal frame of mind. It’s just us.
What else do we have in common? That’s what I’d like to find out. There are stereotypes about us, but we don’t generally trust those, do we? A person who spends a few hours a day online is supposed to be antisocial and awkward in the real world, and certainly, some of us are, but this isn’t the haven of All Ye Who Suffer From Agoraphobia. It initially seems reasonable to suppose that we’re all technologically savvy, but hey, I’ll stand up and be the first to admit that I still don’t really know what “memory” is or does. One widespread trait we share could be as simple as being into weird stuff, but then, some of us are just into normal stuff...a lot.
MrCucumber told me later, in one of our peacemaking conversations, that he’d had trouble getting to know me. Well, no wonder. His grammar was terrible. He only appeared in one chatroom at a time. He didn’t blog. None of that would have been a problem, except that we were an LDR and the internet was the only resource we had for getting to know each other—not to mention the only way I knew how to get to know someone. I never did find it in me to get angry about his ill-advised use of ICQ. He might have chosen it out of cowardice, but it was the right way to get through to me - if only he’d tried it sooner!
These stories of mine are ones I have never told in the real world. There's no audience for it there. That's fine. I have other, equally embarrassing break-up stories for the amusement of my real-world people. But they're not here; they're not citizens. At times I've even tried to pull some of them in, and succeeded only in strengthening the evidence that not everyone belongs here, or wants to.
You do. You know what I mean. You've fallen into the textual communities; you've perpetuated the memes. You have an identity here. We all do. This land is so much more varied and complex than we give it credit for.
So. Who are we?
Acronym Glossary
IRC: Internet Relay Chat
ICQ: Weren't you paying attention?
E-PDA: Electronic Public Displays of Affection. I'm going to be using retro slang here, get used to it, and one such example is the e-hyphen prefix.
AFK: Away From Keyboard
SCA: Society for Creative Anachronism
LDR: Long-Distance Relationship
contemplative
pleased
devious