The beginning, again

By Steve Silberman

In the '70s and '80s, even if you were into something cool like punk rock, gay sex or computer programming in your garage, it was hard not to notice a malaise hovering over the national psyche. Part of the problem was the lack of channels of communication to allow you to route around big media -- the role played by underground newspapers, FM radio, pot-smoking circles and political meetings in the '60s -- and find out what other folks were thinking about the latest gas shortage or fatuous musical trend. In a million individual apartments, by the light of a million TV screens, people rolled their eyes in isolation.

After you got out of college, the most authentic community you could hope to join was couplehood with a mate who shared your embittered sense of humor and secret sense of wonder, and cocoon like hell while the Idiot Wind gusted outside.

The antidote to the 20-year slump turned out not to be a time machine to spirit us all back for a communal wallow in the Woodstock mud, but a proliferation of venues for unfiltered and unpremeditated conversation. Future sociologists will note that the sudden ubiquity of espresso bars and the upsurge in the popularity of online schmoozing networks like the Well addressed the same longing for a "third place" -- a public loitering zone, neither at work nor at home, where friends, acquaintances and intriguing strangers could be drawn into discussions on subjects ranging from the highly perishable news of the day to the eternal verities.

A dial-up connection to the Well provided my first look at the online world seven years ago. Most days, I keep a Well window open on my desktop, where I go to take a few breaths among friends and familiar strangers in the crush of overlapping deadlines.

Media accounts of the Well tend to focus on what you might call its poetry -- the topics opened by long-standing members diagnosed with a terminal illness, the orchestrated samurai assaults on media outrages like Time magazine's promotion of a bogus cyberporn study. Like the heroic moments that mark the turning points in one's family narrative, these occasional breakthroughs remind everyone why they spend so much time staring at the screen in the first place. But the sustained vitality of the Well is in its prose: The minute-to-minute exchange of cranky opinions, expertise, anecdotes, oblique flirtations and particles of revelation among people who know one another just enough to keep up the general level of interest and helpfulness.

I'm not sure why, but there's something about places where small, daily insights are tested and shared like this that makes them hotbeds of fresh ideas. In the presence of so many articulate outlooks on what's happening now, it feels particularly wasteful to wallow in nostalgic longings to live in any other time.

I remember talking to a teenage guitarist in 1989 who told me his favorite bands were the Beatles, CSNY, the Stones ... the same records I owned in high school 15 years before. When I asked him if he ever played his own music, he said, "It's hard to write your own songs when all the good songs have been written."

It struck me that if he discovered that thousands of other kids felt the same way, he might realize there was a kind of scattered identity in all that exile and frustration -- pieces of a song that belonged to his generation. The classic rock on the radio wasn't going to help him find it.

On the Well, it seems like somebody is improvising a fragment of some new melody every few minutes just by saying what's on their mind. Given places where we can hear one another, the music is inexhaustible.

About the author
Steve Silberman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine.

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