I really wish Squishy or Squishettes were still around for me to post this on, but since they aren't, I'm posting this in various places all over the 'net where I know ya'll still hang out.

I have to do this project for the most tedious class ever invented, folklore at the University of Oregon. It't basically a "community" project, where I'm supposed to go out and about and discover a group that I belong to. The problem is that I'm a bit of a hermit, and while I have friends and a social life, I don't really feel like I belong to any communities on campus. After being seriously distressed about this realization, I hopped on my computer to procrastinate, and then it hit me...

You guys. We're a community, right? Many of us keep online journals, and if we don't, we probably read some of them. And if we don't, then we hang out with people who do. So that's something that we have in common. We have our own stories, our own jokes, our own slang...So what are some examples of all of this? What makes us a community? What's interesting about the fact that a lot of us have never met face to face, yet we still have found so much in common?

Talk about us. Talk about yourself.

Thanks!

WD

-- Anonymous, November 06, 2001

Answers

Well, I think you've begun to answer your own question.

The slang one is huge. I've picked up so much slang from Allison alone, like jag and trash. I remember the first time I said "Nice outfit, trash" (or whatever) to my roommate. I almost made her cry.

-- Anonymous, November 07, 2001

You can always address the fact that we are more open than most communities, because of the pseudoanonymity that being on-line gives us. You can also address the downsides of this (trolls and TMI and whatnot).

I wrote a similar paper in high school about the BBS scene, and had a good time with it. It ended up placing in the school's writing competition, as well. There's really a lot of places you can go. Talk about the uniqueness of on-line friendship, the benefits and downsides of developing close relationships on-line. It's also interesting that so many of us do go out of our ways and meet.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

The best way to get the stuff you are looking for,is to go down to your local pub,get shitfaced and take different bloke's home every night and fuck them till they can't take any more. My girlfriend reckons it works for her,so you never know,you might get lucky.

-- Anonymous, May 06, 2002

In this case, I think the pub fucking route will only work if there are a whole lot of oljers at your local pub...or you decide to do your paper on the STD Community - What Mr. Roger's Didn't Tell Us About Sharing.

I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but I'm going to provide a link to a 3WA thread that talks about the demographics of journallers: http://www.threewayaction.com/ubb/Forum15/HTML/000188.html

A link to a thread about cliques: http://www.threewayaction.com/ubb/Forum15/HTML/000009.html

I know that there have been threads devoted to debating whether or not the OLD community exists and what it's characteristics may be if it does, in fact, exist, but I'll be damned if I can find one. Good luck, Lisa!

-- Anonymous, May 06, 2002