Thursday, June 08, 2006

What happens in Vegas...

Just dropping a quick note in here as I wend my way to Las Vegas to participate in the first-ever YearlyKos event.  I can’t actually post this 7:35am report from the gate lounge at SeaTac, because the airport in this allegedly tech-savvy region doesn’t have free WiFi availability.  Not that I’ve explored to see whether, say, the $tarbuck$ down the hall is a WiFi point.

I don’t quite know what I expect to find or do at YearlyKos.  Connecting persons to personas is always an interesting sort of happening.  It stands in sharp contrast to the way these things used to happen.  Back in the day, the operative phrase was “The face is familiar, but I can’t recall the name”.  But in an online community such as dKos, it’s just the opposite.  Community members are already quite familiar with names (well, usernames), personalities, viewpoints, conceptual frameworks ... just about everything except faces and physical appearances.  How old is Kagro X?  Is Delaware Dem male or female?  And so on and so forth.

This isn’t the first time I’ve embarked on this kind of adventure ... heading off to meet a large group of people I already know but have never met.  Back in the late 1980s, when the internet was still new (in fact, my Pitt email address predated the internet ... the university was part of BITNET), one of the first highly-popular mechanisms for computer communication was email lists.  They were usually highly specialized—discussions of, by, and for polymer chemists or Ibsen scholars or dachshund owners.  My avocational interest in word origins and etymology led me, in November 1989, to check out something called WORDS-L, an email list for discussion of the English language.  There were indeed discussion threads on such topics—my first post, as I recall, asked whether there was any evidence for a disproportionately large number of lefthanded people among the developers of the Semitic languages (written from right to left).  It quickly became apparent, though, that WORDS-L was an email list for discussion in the English language—of any and every topic, large or small, personal or general.  It became a swirling community, sharing gossip, arguing over TV shows, offering recipes, asking for advice on purchases, commiserating over deaths and departures, exulting over births and marriages.

And we started meeting each other for “FTFs”.  If someone on the list was changing planes at PIT, I’d drive out there to meet them and keep them company at their gate between flights (ahhh, the good old days).  Someone from Atlanta invited one and all to his annual July 4 cookout, and in 1991 a couple of wordslers took him up on it.  By the next year, we planned and carried out a Clambake near Providence, attended by something like 40 members of the list, nearly all meeting each other for the first time, and coming from as far away as the west coast and Scotland.  These events continue to occur.  Not only the annual July 4 get-together, but also Snowbash in western Massachusetts, occasional Bay Area wordsler gatherings, and so forth.  Now that there’s a web, of course, pictures of WORDS-L events and non-events are easy to locate.

That’s a positive precedent for me as I head to YearlyKos.  I’m sure it’ll be memorable, if a bit overwhelming.  I hope it’ll turn out to be as lasting as WORDS-L and its community have been over nearly two decades.

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Since SkyHarbor in Phoenix has free public WiFi (three cheers for Arizona!), I can post this diary while still en route to YearlyKos.  Not only WiFi—I found an electrical outlet near Gate A8, so I’m even putting juice back into the laptop.  Such a deal!

Further reports from Las Vegas when and if I get the chance to bat them out between meetings and brewskis…