Elegy for the Magic

WHEN I WAS in my last year of University, I shared a house with two friends. One of them was finishing up an undergrad degree in Astrophysics, and I can honestly say without equivocation that it was James who introduced me to the Internet.

He'd come home some nights with pages and pages of all this stuff -- interesting stuff; canonical lists of jokes and references in Monty Python, and episode guides and arguments about the physics of Star Wars. He explained that they were from Newsgroups on the Internet -- which at that point was really still the province of University Students and government researchers. The .com domain was hissed through clenched teeth. When asked what the Internet was, James would reply "it's a computer network designed to let scientists argue about Star Trek."

He didn't tell me about the porn til later.

I nodded my head and went back to writing my Psych essay on my Typewriter. Or if he wasn't busy, on his Coleco Adam computer. Sweet.

Flash ahead to a couple of years later, and my first experience with BBS'es. Bulletin Board Systems were these little walled communities full of people with like interests. It seemed to me like those printouts I'd seen James bring home, but with people who were more or less closer by. Realer.

The two "boards" I got most into were both run on a software platform called FirstClass, which was great because it was actually Mac based. Nothing in those days was -- and I was now the proud owner of a Mac that I still miss -- a beautiful little MacSE. Sigh.

The best board was called MAGIC. It was a Macintosh User Group, and on there I "met" a whole bunch of interesting, literate, fascinating folk -- musicians, computer nerds, media types, ad guys and various and sundry other users. It was in the offices of MAGIC, a few years after I joined, that I finally got to see this World Wide Web thing that I'd seen Tim Berners Lee and other guys talk about in my new job... we gathered around the 14.4 modem and watched as a picture drew, page by page, on our screens. It was like our little BBS, but not -- because anybody could access it, from anywhere. The walls were down. We looked at that crude drawing scanning painfully slowly into place, line by line, and we saw the future-- with a hint of sadness and trepidation. But also excitement.

The other FirstClass BBS I was part of was one at my then place-of-work, TVOntario. It was a grass roots project by a group of three editors, who thought it would be an interesting way to foster community within the spread out organization. TVO (Ontario's PBS) had a famously dysfunctional corporate culture. The TV people and the Education people were always at each other's throats; the offices were spread out over several floors over two buildings at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto, and the whole place had a kind of 'tail wagging the dog' feel to it.

The board that was TVOnline was the first time the Internet got me in trouble, and the first time I heard the phrase, "You should watch what you say." It seems incredibly ironic to me now, twenty years into a career in the media and communications, that variations on that phrase is the single most oft-repeated thing I've come across in my travels, but there you go. That's Canada for you.

What got me in trouble was speaking up on the board. I'd comment on subjects and point out what I thought was right and wrong. I was a junior story editor at this time, only about two years out of University. I had a wonderful, incredibly encouraging mentor in my boss, an Executive Producer who, in his own words, "had hired or fired, or been hired or fired by just about everybody working in the Canadian media." In story meetings, he was the first guy that introduced me to the idea that "best idea wins." I carried over that attitude onto the board.

Such is the strangeness of the TVO corporate culture (at least at that time) that it was only through that board that I started to get to know the other people who were making TV just down the hall from me -- producers like Mark Askwith and Stan Lipsey, and Daniel Richler -- who were making interesting and low budget TV like Imprint and Prisoners of Gravity. My section was Public Affairs, and one of the other things I remember is the grumpy then-host of a documentary show who'd come in to shoot his links every couple months. Some Harvard egghead named Michael Ignatieff. Whatever happened to that dude?

Anyway. The other feature that TVOnline had was an "Anonymous Forum." This was a forum where you could log in as anonymous, and only in this one forum, post a message about anything. It was the virtual version of the bulletin board that everyone could see, where you could sneak up a broadside.

And people did. Oh my God, they did. This was my intro to both the dynamics of an unhappy corporate environment, and the peculiarity of the last moments of the pre-internet mindshift. Also the value and the limits of Anonymous commenting on the Internet -- where people were always a little too free to let their freak flag fly, if you get my meaning.

It soon became clear that the manager of the network -- a tin pot, dour grey suit best forgotten -- was livid at the free expression on this board -- and especially the Anonymous forum. I started to hear whispers attached to fingers that were pointing -- at me. Quoi?

See, I guess the logic went because I was vocal on the board, I was probably also the person who was doing all the most anonymous complaining. People said that the "anonymous" posts "sounded" like me. Around the same time, there were oodles and oodles of links to FRANK from TVO. FRANK was a satirical, Private Eye like magazine that flourished for a while in the late 80's and early 90's, before falling to the gossip sink that the internet became.

Even all these years later, I get tense at the thought of it. That there were people thinking that I was some kind of mole. The weird thing is, nobody ever stopped to ask themselves why the guy who seemed to be saying all this honest stuff, attributed, would also need to use the veiled cloak of anonymity to...what? Complain more? And then leak to the papers? Odd. I just wanted to make good tv.

Anyway, suffice to say that I didn't really see the need to complain anonymously, and I never once fed information to FRANK. But that didn't matter. At one point my contract was not renewed and that was that.

I had a choice at that time. Knuckle under, or keep holding to that stubborn ideal that the best idea wins. After six months unemployment, I picked up another contract in a different department at TVO, but I was never really loyal to the place again. When I got an offer to go work for CityTV on a cutting edge show they were doing about new media, I leapt and never looked back. It was the middle of the summer -- and I actually gave my notice by voicemail, and slipped my resignation letter under the door of my boss. Everyone was on vacation. Nobody said goodbye. No tears were shed - least of all by me.

Thus I started my eight years at the end of the glory days of the CityTV empire. CityTV proved what I'd learned about corporate culture at TVO -- that it was the unhappy units you had to watch out for. There were tons of leaks from Citytv to FRANK, but luckily, they were from the Newsroom, which was an awful sinkhole of a place. Totally toxic environment.

I saw, and heard so much crazy shit over the next few years that never made it into the pages of a satirical weekly because the witnesses were all happy in their jobs. And so was I.

But it was around this time too, that the first romance of the BBS was fading. See, MAGIC, and TVOnline (where everyone was very nice to me now that I'd gotten a better job and gotten out. Typical.) had started experimenting with "Gateways" to the internet. And in the old tradition of "how do you keep'em down on the farm once they've seen Paris?" the general-interest BBS world was starting to become a ghost town.

The commercial service CompuServe went down. AOL was mighty, then not so much. People wanted the internet -- all of the internet. And the 'Net began its exponential monthly growth. It was the Wild West.

In the Internet-based early discussion boards that followed, it quickly became apparent that there was no way to replicate those early days of smart people talking about Star Trek. The cartoon of the time, that I had beside my desk at Citytv for three years, was a hound in front of a keyboard saying to another pooch, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Discussion was impossible because you had no way of knowing whether you were talking to a 12 year old in Topeka or a novelist in Nantucket. The Noise to Signal ratio flipped off the charts.

These were the days where the biggest challenge was getting a handle on everything. Nobody had the right way to search the internet; it was impossible to find anything. There was no Google yet. And Infoseek, Hotbot, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista were all poor substitutes.

So naturally the next iteration was web-based message boards that clustered around a basic interest. The lugwrench board. Parents' groups. Alumni groups. People self-segregated again, only this time not so much like a community. It was more like an endless series of shareholder meetings.

In this climate, I moved from one job inside Citytv to help start up the Canadian Sci-fi Channel, Space. It was a fun time. I was working with people I liked from Muchmusic and City and various other corners of the building -- and I'd even managed to get thrown together with one of the guys I'd met virtually, on that TVO board years before -- Mark Askwith.

One of the first duties I had while we were getting the channel on the air was to be the "official presence" on the "Space board." This was going to be a web-based message board in anticipation of the launch of the channel.

The three or four months leading up to the channel's October 1997 launch were probably the best days of that board, never to be repeated. A great cross section of posters and personalities rapidly made themselves known. Some had inspiring and freaky levels of knowledge in areas that I knew nothing about -- like Manga or Anime. There were a few scientists, too -- flashback to my days reading those printouts from James.

From the beginning, I adopted a persona that was avuncular when met that way, and sarcastic when you came in hot, fronting that you knew better. Because the thing about Sci-Fi fans is, they always think they know better. In those lead up months, there were plenty of interesting questions about how you run a station and set it up that I tried my best to answer. There was also lots of arguing and advice that I said I'd pass on. I tried trying to explain how buying broadcast rights for a series wasn't like going to Blockbuster and renting a video tape (as they then were.) Some people listened. Some didn't. It was fun.

And then the station launched.

Over the next few years, the boards gradually...there's no way really to put this...slid. The persona I'd adopted became unwieldy because you had new people coming in who didn't get the context that had been around since the start. I was locked into the role of being a fierce defender of the station, lest the rabble get out of hand and start marching with torches. I still tried my best to engage with readers and posters who had legit questions or wanted to know how things worked. But those were being edged out by the hostiles.

There comes a time in the life of every message board where the internet lion syndrome takes over. That's where people who are milquetoast and unassuming in real life decide they can be raging assholes or know it all's online, because they can be. (I always took pride in the fact that my personality on and offline was pretty much the same. Maybe I was more charming in person. Okay, probably. But that's because emoticons are bullshit.) When you see messages and opinions laid out side by side, no differentiation, it's hard to tell at first glance someone who has a lick of sense from somebody who doesn't. "Best idea wins" becomes impossible because people become instantly enraged if you suggest that, in fact, that theory they're spouting is somewhat devoid of logic and sense. "How dare you challenge me and my opinion?" takes over. Subjects descend into flamewars. And people say things that they would never, ever, ever say in person, face to face.

And at a certain level, especially on a network level, an uncomfortably high percentage of the posts become people just there to bitch and moan about how you suck, and do everything wrong, and how much better a chimp could do if they were in that position, blah. blah. blah. Level of entitlement = staggering.

So...Neighborhood blight sets in.

And the worst part about it is that just like with neightbourhood blight, the good neighbours are the first to leave...people who could save it, the thoughtful, interesting, witty, well-informed posters look around and say, "Eff this."

So you're left with just the rabble and the yahoos. The membership rolls may say you have 3 or 4000 members, but there's only 20 or 30 who post. And they're all hardened into basic types. There's the Professor, who corrects everyone's grammar, doesn't really contribute much -- but points out every possible inconsistency no matter how small -- and posts links to more thoughtful articles but never really has much to say about them. There's the quipper, who makes lame one line jokes about everything that aren't half as funny as they think they are. There's Roid Rage, who decides that their mission in life is to slam and complain and sturm and drang and point out what an asshole you are -- proving what an asshole they are. And a few other misfit toys here and there.

In the case of the Space board, it went through several different software lives, shed moderators here and there, gained some interesting personalities but could never, ever keep them. After I left, Mark Askwith took over as the "official voice" and tried to take the complete opposite tack -- killing everyone with kindness. The dead enders loved him best, but it did nothing to tamp down the general idiocy, negativity, or sheer disinformation fluffing across the transom. Mark and I would meet solemnly in the pub now and again, the Evil master of Evil and Mr. Polite, and laugh and whoop it up about the same idiot posts we'd read. Rarely did we actually, well...disagree.

So this whole long history now comes because in the wake of the CTV sale of CHUM assets, I heard they're finally shuttering the Space board for good. It's probably overdue. It just doesn't make sense to support a platform where 99 percent of the conversation is either critical of you or irrelevant to your business.

But the funny thing is that the time for that kind of board has also passed; supplanted by threads on news stories (which still generate 90 percent idiot opinions) or the more elegant solution -- personal management tools -- things like Twitter or Digg or Ilike, where you can start to build, from the vastness of the net, a smaller community of your own interests. Finally the Net has gotten to a place again where it can be tamed. The time of big open forums like OpenSalon or The Well is probably gone for good. But now you can manage your own conversations in real time, and create a board with the people you like or trust or find to be interesting thinkers.

So it's all come full circle.

I wouldn't trade my experience with boards like that for anything. It's taught me a lot about how creators should and shouldn't interact with fans (leave 'em alone to talk amongst themselves, control the interaction and don't go in one-on-one, because then it becomes about "showing you up and taking you down.") and it's also taught me about how communities evolve and change, and how technology can help shape them.

It's one of the reasons why through all the uncertainty about how TV will go in the future, I'm not worried. I have no idea how it will work itself out yet. But I know it will work itself out.

And I know that occasionally, as I have over the years, I'll run into one of those early net posters and BBS people, or more likely, they might come up to me and introduce themselves. And we'll nod and smile and remember the early days when it was all just....Magic.