Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(About old magnetic tapes:  maybe the Computer History Museum knows who
can help? https://computerhistory.org/contact-us/)
  

    <scribbled by apdg Thu 14 Dec 23 20:31>
  

    
Another difference, one I've seen both at work and in some niche
communities, is the primary use of mobile devices to use social
media.  So no more keyboards/mice for writing long passages (like in
this topic) but instead just using pictures and terse messaging.

I'm on a private discord server where it's very clear who is using a
computer and who is using a mobile device looking at the content and
length of posts.  I kept my Blackberry running far longer than others
by swapping out batteries, but I could still not participate in a
topic like this (this one on the well) using its wee keyboard.

Where I'm going with this is more of a quesiton -- how does using only
mobile devices (including tablets) change the nature of discussion and
mutual support?  My online support groups in the 90s were almost
entirely text-only mailing lists and occasionally USENET.  We were
able to have long, interactive discussions over time, would we have
tried doing that with only today's mobile devices?
  

    
(Unless you know the data on it are encrypted, getting data off a
9-track is something an expert can do. The issues are having a tape
drive that works and dealing with deterioration of the magnetic
coating.)
  

    
Also, thanks for the comparison with fandom.  I've never really been a
part of it but I've had friends since the USENET days who were heavily
involved in that world.   From fanfic to conventions to trading ripped
copies of old VHS and BETA tapes, this virtual community was rather
important.
  

    
I swear this post is cursed to never stay - this is the second time
a cat and my own clumsiness have taken it out, but no longer! Even
so, I still have way too many thoughts and lots of grading to avoid.

So, in response to Kevin...

“Do you think former TCF users experienced that change as a
collective loss? Or, was it just part of a larger shift to the
“always on” web services you describe later in the book?”

That’s a fascinating question! I don’t actually know a lot about the
average user’s perspective, but I also think that the TCF model
itself appealed to a very specific demographic. Any users who stuck
around, especially once they moved to the Web, I suspect stayed for
the familiarity and community - even though it was anonymous, it
wasn’t as anonymous-feeling as the “wild Web.” Even though it was an
online community, it still had some of the same social norms of an
in-person social/support group (including being very hesitant about
the presence of youth).

There’s a whole media counterhistory of the roads not taken that
looks at what would have happened if the Cable TV-style “channels”
model of centralized interaction, which for years had been the
foundation of all the major commercial walled gardens, remained
relevant and commercially viable. One of my white whales is tracking
down the small-scale AOL subcontractors who ran these communities,
because I think their experience could help explain a lot about the
present moment.

“More generally, I’m curious to know how people deal with repeated
struggles to make space on different platforms. Do you have a sense
of how long-time participants in trans spaces online respond to
platform problems (e.g., the destruction of Twitter) differently
from users with less experience? Can communities develop a kind of
collective resilience? Or, does the disruption become a kind of
inevitability? Like, oh well, nothing lasts forever!”

It’s hard to say how folks respond to platform problems for sure, in
part because of the big generation shift. Anecdotally, it seems like
“average” users (not administrators) have generally followed age
trends, simply moving on from a platform when problems arise
eventually settling. It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but Brianna
Dym and Casey Fiesler’s work on fandom migration gets at some of
this change over time (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3392847). So,
if I find folks who were active in those early days online, they’ve
basically all decamped to Facebook and maybe Twitter. For folks who
came out online as teens, they went from websites to LJ to a wider
dispersal pattern - Tumblr, Twitter, or Reddit.

But there’s two things that muddy the water when it comes to fully
understanding this question of community resilience and disruption,
I think. First, the overall timeline of change in platforms and how
stable the last twenty years have relatively been. Prior to the rise
of centralized social media, there always seemed to be something
“new” on the horizon that would change interaction - especially for
the later adopter, who didn’t get online until the mid to late
1990s. They never experienced the BBS and Usenet era, and they
didn’t have years of CompuServe or Prodigy subscribership under
their belt. 

Their sense of “internet time” moved from the flash of AOL to the
explosion of the Web to the post-crash shift to social-style
platforms like Facebook and Myspace. Centralized social media slowed
all that disruption way down, and if there were any struggles, it
was users fighting to make space to stay where they could reach
their existing social groups/networks. If you’re already on
Facebook, you want to stay where all your friends are. Or if you’re
on Reddit, you want the trans subreddits to be healthy spaces. Even
if you had your preferred “trans” spaces and your “non-trans”
platforms, accepted public wisdom that you were choosing from a
limited number of options to choose from. 

I’d say these fights have more in common with, say, GLAAD fighting
for equitable representation on network TV during the 1980 and
1990s. GLAAD and LGBTQ creatives start from a place of limited
resources seeking more from the networks, but everyone in this
discussion accepts the basic premise that network TV is where the
mass American audience is. Sure, you can go to cable, but it’s not
going to have the same reach as, say, Ellen on ABC. The emergence of
streaming media, amongst other factors, allowed creatives to
question this very premise. Basically, why do I need ABC when
Netflix is right there and not subject to all the limitations of
broadcast networks? 

It’s only now with the destruction of Twitter and increasing energy
toward returning to a decentralized Internet that the trans
communities on these established platforms, but especially Twitter,
are experiencing a similar disruption for the first time in a very
long time. So folks are looking elsewhere to rebuild networks, or
questioning the basic premise of centralized media. Instead, they’re
(as one example) seeking out smaller, closed Discord servers.

But the rise of Discord, whose demographic tends much younger than
(as an example) Facebook, gets at the second thing I noted re:
community resilience and disruption: the cyclical nature of trans
spaces in general, but especially online. Trans spaces have always
been very vulnerable to churn, both at the membership and leadership
level. At the member level, folks would access support and social
groups as long as they needed them, but they were likely to become
less necessary over time. It might be that you find more acceptance
from folks outside of these groups, and so you interact less, you
support them with less money. You may just stop showing up at all.
So what keeps these groups running is a cadre of dedicated leaders,
but that pool is small, and they may eventually burn out from
overwork. Maybe they stay average members, but if they don’t, new
folks take over. And in all of this churn, institutional memory is
slowly lost and may never return. This is at the core of the
collapse of the local support group network in the US, in my view:
fresh new members stopped coming and eventually there wasn’t any
point in continuing.

This is one of the major differences between trans groups and fandom
that’s really important, I think. Folks stay in fandom for years,
and that institutional memory stays with them. Folks on Tumblr were
active as far back as Usenet and their memories, collected in places
like Fanlore (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page), creates the
capacity for resilience. There’s no equivalent for trans folks
online - trans youth are always rediscovering their history, but
it’s focused on big moments and figures, not the quotidian realities
of community maintenance. This isn’t to say those moments and
figures aren’t important - they absolutely are - but that a part of
resilience is knowing that trans folks have faced these specific
kinds of challenges before and made it through. This is, I admit,
something I hope to get across with the book - that trans folks have
always made it through tough times, but it’s because we did it for
ourselves and showed up for each other.
  

    
Jet: "Where I'm going with this is more of a question -- how does
using only mobile devices (including tablets) change the nature of
discussion and mutual support?"

I think it's a really prescient question! The form an interaction
takes and how one interacts with the screen plays a large role.
Mobile phones are a highly visual medium, and they encourage
interactions that emphasize images over text. And using interfaces
that a designed to match the affordances of one but not the other
can disincentivize interaction for those without sufficient
motivation to overcome that friction. (For example, my own two
butterfingers-induced accidental scribbling of the post you're
responding to were the result of re-reading on mobile. 

"thanks for the comparison with fandom.  I've never really been a
part of it but I've had friends since the USENET days who were
heavily involved in that world. From fanfic to conventions to
trading ripped copies of old VHS and BETA tapes, this virtual
community was rather important."

I'd argue like fandom and young women (and young women in fandom!)
are some of the most consequential innovators when it comes to the
formation of online communities, and how fandom adapts to changes in
platforms online can be an indicator of things to come.
  

    
(Thanks for the tips about tape <karish> and <matisse>. If I can get
some traction on recovering the data, I’ll post about it!)

Quoting <apdg>:
> Where I'm going with this is more of a question -- how does using
only
> mobile devices (including tablets) change the nature of discussion
and
> mutual support?  My online support groups in the 90s were almost
> entirely text-only mailing lists and occasionally USENET.  We were
> able to have long, interactive discussions over time, would we
have
> tried doing that with only today's mobile devices?

This is another great question! It’s so fascinating to think about
what happens in spaces like Discord where people are clearly
engaging through such different interfaces. 

It also calls back to my earlier thought about whether earlier
systems were more “writerly.” There’s a related question here about
reading, writing, and time. On USENET, it was not uncommon to post a
message and wait days or weeks for a response. It simply took that
much time for messages to get around to the right people. Now, we
expect all sorts of communication to unfold at the speed of chat.
(Present-day anxieties about being “left on read” speak to just how
much meaning can be bundled into micro delays.) 

(Shoot. Now you’ve also got me thinking that the term
“microblogging” might be the “horseless carriage” of the 2010s!)

Thinking beyond typing and editing text, however, it seems like
low-cost, spontaneous video is the defining medium of the moment.
While there are many big commercial influencer accounts essentially
recreating the broadcast paradigm, there is also a ton of mundane,
everyday video being made and shared on TikTok, Instagram, FaceTime,
Twitch, etc. The sheer number of hours is overwhelming.

The Two Revolutions anticipates this turn to visual media with the
rise of digital photography on the WWW. What do you think of amateur
online video as a medium for individual expression, identity
exploration, and mutual support? I'm thinking about folks who might
not engage in a long exchange of written messages but will turn on
their phone cameras and bare their souls. 
  

    
> and wait days or weeks for a response.

When Australia joined(?) USENET in the 80s, their Internet connection
was boxes of data tapes shipped to/from (I think) Los Angeles.
  

    
Another social media I was thinking about while doing boring housework
tasks this afternoon -- what about private social media systems like
fetlife.com?  Yes, very porn oriented, but also full of groups of
people with similar and often diverse interests.  Also hard to data
mine (at least as an outsider) but from time to time I see people who
have obviously had surgery, are in their 20s, and figuring out their
new sexual/social life.
  

    
Today is the last *scheduled* day for this conversation, the end of
our guest's commitment, but if Avery and Kevin are up for it and
there's more to discuss, there's no reason the conversation can't
continue.

Our thanks to Avery, Kevin, and all the participants in the
conversation so far! 
  

    
Thank you so much, Avery, for writing this book!
  

    
I'm sorry I'm behind in wrapping up - I've just finished and
submitted my final grades. However, I'll be around as long as folks
want to chat!


Kevin :"What do you think of amateur online video as a medium for
individual expression, identity exploration, and mutual support? I'm
thinking about folks who might not engage in a long exchange of
written messages but will turn on their phone cameras and bare their
souls."

It's definitely become the preferred mode of expression. I think
there's something to the seeming "authenticity" of video - it feels
like a person who exists out in the world, not just an anonymous
user. I think there's some parallels in the interviews I did in
2014, even though they're now almost 10 years old. At the time, all
of my interviewees under 30 expressed a real preference for social
media platforms like IG or Tumblr over old-school message boards
like Susan's Place because they felt more "real" - which, when I
probed further, seemed to be connected to the visual-first element
of social media. The poster was a person they could see, not just a
username and random icon.

Jet: "Another social media I was thinking about while doing boring
housework tasks this afternoon -- what about private social media
systems like fetlife.com?"

I think spaces like FetLife may have a significant role, though it's
complicated to study. The interwoven nature of gender and sexuality,
espeically for folks transitioning into a different self-identity,
mean one will inevitably affect the other, but it's hard to discuss
in public because these discussions are so often wielded against
trans people or used to reinforce dominant narratives about their
deviancy.