I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've been on the Internet for a long time. Long enough that I remember when getting online actually felt like going somewhere. Before Facebook. Before Instagram. Before everybody carried a smartphone around in their pocket.
For me, the Internet used to be a collection of places. There were forums where you'd know the regulars. You'd recognize people's usernames. You'd have conversations that might go on for days or weeks. There were little communities built around whatever weird thing you happened to be interested in, and I loved that.
One of the communities I was involved with here in Springfield, MO was an old phpBB forum called "417Vibe". Somebody handed me a flyer for it back in the early 2000s, I signed up, and suddenly I knew a whole bunch of people I probably never would have met otherwise. That was how the Internet worked for me. You didn't necessarily know someone's real name. You knew their screen name. You knew what they were interested in. You knew what kind of music they liked. You'd see them show up in the same conversations over and over again, and eventually you might meet them in person. Sometimes those online friendships became real friendships.
Then MySpace happened. Then Facebook. Somewhere along the way, I think the Internet changed from being about "us" to being about "me".
That's not necessarily a criticism of any particular website. Facebook did some incredible things. It made it ridiculously easy to stay connected to people and put everybody in the same place. But it also changed the nature of that place. Instead of going to a community to see what everybody was talking about, I started going to a feed to see what the algorithm decided I should see. Instead of having a conversation that everybody could participate in, we started having individual conversations that happened to be visible to everybody else.
The Internet became much more personalized, but somehow felt less personal. I've never quite gotten over that.
I think that's part of the reason I've always been drawn to projects that try to build communities. It's probably why I got involved with 417EDM. It's why I care about preserving the history of the local electronic music scene. It's why I started the 417 Mix Collection. And it's probably partly why I'm back here writing on Hive after all these years.
I'm not particularly interested in building another place where everybody comes to consume content. I'd rather build something where people actually participate. That's one of the things I like about the idea behind 417EDM. There are people in this town who have been involved in this scene for 20+ years, and there are people discovering it for the first time right now. Most of them don't know each other. There's a story there, there's a community there, and I think those things are worth documenting.
That's also why the first episode of the 417EDM Podcast ended up being with Psyberwitch. We talked about this very thing during the interview. She told me about discovering the rave scene, getting involved with 417Vibe and some of those early parties, and how different things feel now that everybody has a phone in their hand all the time.
We both came from that same weird period of the Internet where you could stumble into a community and actually become part of it. Maybe that's what I'm trying to find again. Not the old Internet exactly, because we can't go backwards of course, but maybe we can build little pieces of that feeling again.
I don't know. I'm still figuring that part out. But I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I suspect I'm not the only one.