Here is another blog entry that I’m reposting with some minor alterations. I’m also tacking on this little preamble as a sort of summation and update to what I still regard as one of the few things I wrote for the blog that is a truly “successful” piece of writing. Successful in that I feel happy enough with it not to want to change every sentence and also because I think that it had something of an impact with others (probably more than anything else I’ve ever written which isn’t saying much to be honest). The subject matter of the entry is the real time chat room that was at one time linked to the disinfo.com website and the oddball little community that grew up around it that ended up having a really important impact on my life during my early 20s. Those were the years of my late-late adolescent crisis, a time when I became deeply alienated from almost everyone around me in the “real world”, and so the sense of belonging I began to feel online meant a great deal to me. The chatroom also happened to be my first real *initiation* into the internet, a good few years before Web 2.0 took centre stage, and back when ipods and androids were scarcely a glimmer on the horizon: the sense of adventure and the chaotic inventiveness of the web of the early 90s, and most of all the innocence still hadn’t completely dissipated. After about a decade or so of hosting the room, however, disinfo decided to disable its chat function, finally putting paid to our wee group which had been dwindling for lack of interest anyway. Still regardless of how quiet it had been near the end, quite a few of us were upset by the end of the chatroom and so we tried to do something: we wrote an online to disinfo to bring it back as well as searching for other forums and chatrooms where we could recreate something of the spirit of the old room. In fact in the end, a couple of years after I wrote this piece, me and a couple of ex chatters started using the facebook group chat function to talk to each other, and for a brief moment it almost seemed that we had recaptured a little of what we had lost with the demise of the chatroom. Alas, for me anyway, it wasn’t to last long. I had a particularly bad falling out with a couple of chatters (I’ll spare everyone the gory details) and finally realised the futility of my past efforts to bring back the chatroom, or to be more precise to re-engage with the old community of chatters I had once been so close to. More than anything I felt I was now too old to have patience enough to engage in the endless mindgames and trolling that had been a large part of the former chatroom — and which I’d conveniently forgotten about during all of my rose tinted reminiscences on days gone back. The irony being that the new facebook group chat actually turned out to be too successful a revisitation of those earlier times….
— AFK, 5/3/13
Disinfo Chat
I remember when I first started coming to the chat room. It’s definitely been over 10 or 11 years now. Back then I didn’t have a computer at home and the concept of the internet was still essentially a novelty. It wasn’t inevitable (at least to my mind) that it would become as all pervasive as it has, that it would have such a dramatic impact on the way we shop, listen to music, what we watch, or how we take in the news – on pretty much everything. Those were innocent days.
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