Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Slippage from fig. You got right to the heart of the matter, man.
  

    
Reva slipped in with more valuable insights.
  

    

Yeah,  I agree,  and I used to disagree.  I think online community is
a critical,  even if often unspoken part of online commerce.  
  

    
I don't think that people not on the Well are buying the book to look
at it as a curiousity. I think that there are now many online
communities who may not be as tight as the Well was but they find
themselves wondering about the dynamics of communities and buy the book
for that. I've known a couple of people who told me they bought the
book for that reason. They have gotten involved in some fan communities
and gotten pretty closely affiliated with some of those relationships
and, as mentioned above, the health communities can get pretty close. 
  

    

That's sure nice to hear (about people buying the book, and their
reasons for it). All the book needs is a little viral push (there's no
rpt. no publicity budget, or book tour budget, but that's just me
whining).

Health communities do certainly get close, especially if they suffer
from something relatively rare and incapacitating, like Lou Gehrig's.
In fact, years ago I stumbled on a Lou Gehrig's community and it was a
real eye opener.
  

    

>(there's no rpt. no publicity budget, or book tour budget, but that's just
>me whining)

You are part of a gigantic chorus line of authors, myself included, singing
that tune.
  

    


Andee Baker writes:



Regarding the WELL relationships mentioned by Cliff in his post #98, do
people from the WELL continue to meet f2f, with newcomers as well as
oldtimers?  I am working toward a book project on couples who meet online
--(write me if interested--/plug), and here I am wondering about the dynamics
of VC's and the friendships, and get-togethers as well as romances.  Since
the WELL was locally-based at first, has the increased membership from other
states within the US and countries around the world hindered offline meetings
and thus, the community? Has the comradery continued without f2f meats,
perhaps supplemented by icq/aims and phone or have people managed to gather
across distance to solidify bonds which may spring up online?  Lots of
questions...

My own experience in other VC's would say that people do meet up, and
communicate through different venues than the original, in their travels or
at preplanned events.  I was curious whether the original "core" had spread
out geographically.

Thx, in advance--
andee



email:  bakera@ohiou.edu
  

    

The WELL wan't really "locally based," although the majority of our users
were local to the Bay Area.

We did, and do, have gatherings all the time.

My wife and I met at a series of WELL-mediated events here in the Bay Area.
  

    
"... but I wonder a bit about the roots of that specialness.
 Was it perhaps a technical consequence of the hassles of dealing with
 picospan compared to Compuserve? An outgrowth of the Well's Whole Earth
 roots? Luck?"

"...the majority of our users were local to the Bay Area.."

QED.

The Well was an in group from the beginning.
  

    

More from Andee:


from andee baker:

Oh, sorry, Dave.  Bad choice of words on my part, not locally based, just
drew a lot of people from the SF Bay area.
  

    
Why I think writing a book about the well is a so-to-speak well-nigh
impossible task...
There are certain experiences in life, often intense and often
hilarious (and everyone has had these) which, when you come to tell
others about it, always falls flat in the telling.  One's interlocutor
looks blank and one adds lamely, 'I guess you had to be there.'  I
think the well experience in its Camelot phase was that sort of thing. 
Someone once wrote a book about the Hog Farm (which I was very briefly
a part of) which suffered from the same problem as Katie's book.  Yes,
this happened and then that happened, colorful characters, emotional
storms, but...you had to be there.

I suppose one of the models for this sort of book is Hemingway's A
Movable Feast, about the Camelot of expatriate Paris in the 20s.  It
tends to succeed because the author was a central figure in the tale he
is telling.  In contrast, the innumerable books written about the
Algonquin round-table wits typically fail to capture what made that
coterie so remarkable.  You get the same dozen or so one-liners and
then blah--yet these people had lunch together every day for years amid
great hilarity.  Again, you had to be there.  A difficult literary
problem.
  

    

>The Well was an in group from the beginning.

You yourself are proof that the above statement is false, Dave.
  

    
I was always - by background and choice - an outsider on the Well.
After all, there wern't too many Bay area younger people who could
relate to a two-war commissioned military warrior, twice the age of
most Wellites, from the conservative state of Colorado, and wondered
outloud whether the world would be better off if California was just
sawed off and floated out to sea..
  

    
Yeah, but you haven't talked us into sawing it off yet and you're still
here.
  

    

Dave, I don't think you're an outsider any more than someone like Jim
Rutt.  Having different opinions and beliefs does not in and of itself make
you an outsider.  AT least to me.
  

    
Yeah, jeez, Dave...:-)
  

    
It's an interesting question just who IS an outsider on the Well...
  

    
I think there are some people who will keep themselves "outside" any society,
online or offline.  The same pathologies that afflict people out there
afflict people in here.
  

    

Hey, DAvid, you might want to try saying that without such loaded terms
as "pathologies"! :)
  

    
^pathologies^quirks

'kay?
  

    

  And note that obsessively trying to be _inside_ any society can also
be a pathology -- er, quirk.
  

    

 A plug for hearing Katie: I heard the Cody's presentation
 (Andy Ross asked me to introduce Katie)--and it was
 totally cool: I could see how the book created a lens--
 but also how the author was aware of other possible
 lenses through which to see the Well.

 Go hear Katie!
  

    
Well, I've been on the WELL for over 10 years, and I've never felt
particularly in.  I've been kind of doing my own thing, and having my own
fun, and liking being a part of the community.

I've met a few WELLians over the years, I've been to a few parties.  I
got a place to stay from the WELL, and I even dated someone I met on the
WELL.  

But it hasn't replaced my everyday life.  Not by a longshot.

Saying that the WELL is an in-group is an over-simplification, and like
most over-simplifications is doomed to failure.

I read Katie's article when it first came out, and what I was struck by
then was how the WELL she described was not the WELL that I particularly
knew and liked.  

The WELL is what it is.
  

    
I visualized the WELL in some way early on as a circle of people passing a
microphone... nothing in the middle, each person speaking from the "outside"
of the circle and making up the circle.  Some more supported and admired,
some hurting, some healing, some telling truths from wisdom and gained 
insight and some nothing the lack of clothes on the emporeror, with 
innocent newbie eyes. All outside in some sense, making the circle.
(Sure, it's a better description of a single topic, but the image was
vivid for me.  I even conceived of moving clockwise around my conference 
list each session.)

But that was probably before I knew there could be unlisted private 
conferences.  When I started work very late in 1991, they were rare.  
Now they are plentiful, though most have very little traffic and are used
briefly or not at all before going silent.  Cliff, I remember when you 
gave the directive to set up all that were requested without the kind of 
business or official purpose required before.  I marvel now about the day 
when short conversations with cc's were the main way to have a side
conversation.    

To me, the shifts made by the interplay between policy changes and
software changes are part of the most rewarding aspect of the WELL.  And a
prime reason I loved working here.  The story of tools versus rules and
the rules set by the design of tools.  To skirt around one of Cliff's many
amazing aphorisms. 

Katie, how did you decide how much technological complexity needed to be
included in the story?   
  

    

And Katie, for those who have not read the book, would you say if any of
the people who have posted here so far are in the book, and if so, in what
context?