I’ve been trying to figure out, for the last two weeks, what to write. The words just wouldn’t come…
With that out of the way, here’s what I’ve come up with for the time being.
I used to claim to be a child of the 80’s. Lately, I’ve realized, that while I still have many roots in 80’s culture (I’m a big fan of the big hair, jean-jackets, and slap bracelets, and not to mention the music), my loyalties, at least in terms of “culture-childhood”, lie elsewhere.
I realize, and at the same time, admit my greatest weakness…
I’m a child of the Internet.
I’ve always been interested in technology. I’ve always been interested in instant communication with people half a world away, regardless and even apathetic to differences in race, creed, and in many cases, language. Call me an idealist, at heart, but when I first got on the Internet, when I first heard those squealing modem sounds as I connected, this time not to a local Bulletin Board System, but to the Internet.
I was going global, baby.
I honestly believed that I was about to stumble into an indescribable landscape of information, communication, and community, filled with rousing topics of the day, new friends that you’d probably never meet, and of course, help on your homework.
To this day, I still chuckle at my naivety.
None of those things I really, truly found. The information is difficult to find without a proper search engine (and back in the day, we didn’t have no newfangled “Google”, just Yahoo with only 500,000 pages to search through!), the communication, especially interesting or meaningful communication, is difficult to find, and the community?
Don’t get me started about “community” on the Internet.
I’ve been members of “communities”, although I use the term loosely. I find a webcomic here or there, so I join the forums, only to be flamed to hell and insulted whenever I post. I join Tech news forums to keep up on new technology advances and communicate with fellow geeks, only to have to slog through endless crapfloods and flamewars. I peruse a IT/Legal resource site and read about the current SCO debacle, and I find…
Wait a minute, a small community, relatively new, and still unscathed by the muck of morons.
This is where the concept of Signal to Noise Ratio comes in.
For those of you with little or no technical audio experience, here’s a terse and highly unhelpful technical explanation.
Signal to Noise, effectively, is a ratio between the amount of signal (the part of the audio that you want), and noise (the part of the audio you don’t). In other words, signal would be the band playing, and noise would be any static, hiss, feedback, or other crap that destroys the beauty of the sound coming through the sound system.
High signal to noise is a good thing.
The term has been adopted by Internet users, and slightly modified, to mean the ratio on any group, community, or site between actual, helpful, or Just Plain Good (TM) information, and the flamebait, crapfloods, and other dreck that oozes and permeates into that system.
Having been on the Internet for several years, having been an IRC junkie (and still one, to a degree), and having tried to find an Internet “home” for myself, I’ve discovered that there’s a tipping point, a moment of critical mass, when some community goes from tight-knit to steamy-shit.
When it first starts, the community is small, everyone knows everybody else, and no control on the usage of the community is necessary. After all, there’s nobody there who would even imagine abusing the system.
Then somebody on a site that’s already popular links to this small, friendly community, and suddenly, it’s the National “Moron’s on Parade” down main street of this tiny Internet town.
What I’m saying is, this place, this site that I’ve built for myself, is my own little refugium from the urban sprawl of the rest of the Internet. If I’ve told you about my little home, then this is the same, in my mind, as inviting you into my home. I trust you, and you are welcome here.
Please, by all means, make yourself comfortable. And I’ll do my best to keep the signal high, and the noise low.
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