Online musings

While I was still at Rhodes I became really active on the university forums. I loved it, got really involved and swept away by the giddy thrill that comes with the message board medium. It's a very gratifying (but occasionally frustrating) way of communicating. Being on a forum allows you to create a sense of community that is hard to capture on sites like Facebook.

Anyway, the university got fed up with people trying to use the forums as a place to hawk their services and kicked those of us who were no longer on campus off. I said a fond farewell to Castle Creepy and thought that was the end of the online world.

I was still at The Southern Cross when I found Table Talk, the forum attached to the Salon site. I was really put out that you had to pay to play, but that didn't stop me from lurking like a big lurky thing. I lurked for about three years until I came to the UK and then I paid and started to post.

And it was only then that I discovered a few pockets of community in this mass of discussion (Otters, we call ourselves, don't ask). And I feel as intensely about these online friends as I do about any of my real life friends. Some of these "invisible friends" have become real life friends - we've been on holidays together, visited each other, shared dinner and too much red wine, and really good martinis).

So I was bereft last night when the message went out that Table Talk was being shut down (even The Mother and The Sister were horrified for me: "Oh noes! Now you will have no friends at all!"). We're moving into a new forum, and I'm hoping the tight little community will stay tight. Because it is it's own culture, in a way, with its own myths and lore and beliefs and taboos. Community is about people, not place, so we should be all right.

The Otters will live on!