Hello again, gentle noder. You may remember me from a few daylogs I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I have been watching the reaction to them unfold in waves across the nodegel, and thinking a lot about what has been said and done in response. Last night I dreamt about it all and processed it in a way that only the subconscious mind can do, and lucky for me I was lucid enough to remember the conclusions that I drew from the dream. And wouldn't you know it? I feel compelled to try and articulate them, which is what I've written below.
This daylog is about Everything2 and time.
In her daylog from April 3, 2007, my beloved graceness wrote out some words to try and express the frustration that I believe she and I share with a lot of the people who have participated in building this database and the community that grew out of it many years ago. They were her own words, and one line in particular — The trouble I'm seeing is - there is no room for a "beginning" stage here. It is almost expected that your first write-up be stellar, or so help you God and Sunny Jesus. — so inspired our dear Wiccanpiper that he made it the principal subject of his editor log for this month.
In his epistle, directed not only to Gracie but to everyone who has tried in some way to express this concept and convey the nature of its "ugly head", he states very emphatically: YOUR FIRST WRITEUP DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THE BEST YOU'LL EVER PRODUCE. He then explains very politely that, in fact, well, the administration would very much like it if you would simply try to make your first submission here "your best effort and the first of many", and that their sacred duty is to help you try harder to polish up your writeup so that it shines in the eyes of the noders who have earned their suffrage. If only everyone would simply "dig in" and "get down to the pleasant work required"... well, you can read the rest yourself.
I do not mean to pick on Wiccanpiper (he knows I think he's the bee's knees), but he was punctual enough in his response to provide me with a very timely and convenient example of the sort of reaction I have been seeing from a few folks who, unfortunately, are missing the point. Over the past day I have seen this mindset (I hesitate to call it a simple attitude) manifest itself in what I would qualify as passive-aggressive submissions to mauler's very well-intentioned quest. Taking the piss at your mates is all fine and well, but this is something darker coming from the heart, and I feel it may be symptomatic of the resentment felt by those who take umbrage with my stated positions - however well or poorly I have made them. I know for certain that at least one individual feels personally insulted by what I have written about E2, even though that person never crossed my mind even once when I was writing any of it.
Nevertheless, E2's official response has been a very rational, reasonable, even-tempered one that I very much respect and deeply appreciate. What some of my colleagues have failed to understand about the true nature (as I see it) of "the problem" is something that I myself have been slow at coming to terms with, and consequently have failed to express in any adequate way. Much of the discussion that has taken place in the past few weeks has helped in tuning my focus, and in my dream last night, everything became clear. The issue we are dealing with here is not so much a "quality vs. crap" argument (framed at times in a very tongue-in-cheek way as an "accountants vs. pirates" thing), nor is it entirely a "Brave New E2 vs. the dinosaurs" turf war. I agree with donfreenut when he describes E2's past as being about the pursuit of a certain aesthetic that has fallen out of fashion, as well as most everything that Walter and others have added to the debate. But really, no matter which "side" of the issue you feel that you tend to favor, I think most of our failures to grapple with the elephant in the room is that we grab on to some piece of it and miss what that piece has in common with everything else. When you peel away all the esoteric superficial aspects of the problem, it all comes down to life's most precious commodity: time.
Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
or half a page of scribbled rhymes
Hanging on in quiet desperation
is the English way
The time has gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say
— From Time by Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)
A few months ago I ran across a daylog by Auduster that had been written almost two years ago - posted one month to the day after my infamous editor log, in fact. I bookmarked it because it struck a chord in my mind that was harmonic of many different notes I had heard in many different places and from many different voices over the last four or so years. I wish I had given myself more time to study its resonance and reflect upon my earlier and more impassioned writings on the situation rather than subjecting myself to the posting deadline imposed by my sixth anniversary, but hindsight is 20-20. In his analysis of the malaise on April 15, 2005, he writes:
The requirement for volume posting means that E2 requires a massive time contribution from users in order to progress. With the increasing bias towards length and quality, this meant that E2 users were judged on their time contribution. This mechanism selects for users with disproportionate amounts of free time: the young, students and similar. By leaving anyone with less than 25 writeups without the franchise, (which grew to mean a minimum of 25 hours contribution) active human beings less committed to the project had no influence on the direction of the {site}. E2 therefore came to increasingly represent the interests of those who could manage the necessary time contribution.
People, this is straight-up wisdom. Read through the quote again and digest it. I believe, finally, that this is what the whole thing is really about. While Auduster recently added "I completely stand by the main thrust of the argument, but dear god I wish I'd written it in a different way", I have to commend him for succeeding admirably at getting across the point. Well done, sir.
When I joined E2, I was fascinated by what I found here. Littered amid the considerable piles of textual garbage were literary jewels. Pearls of wisdom. Koans. Precious little emo gems and clever jokes, and everything was sewn together with a lighthearted, playful subtext that lately seems to be the thing that we who remember it are having such a hard time putting into words. I think more than anything, this curiosity is what has distracted me until now from seeing the bigger picture. When I started, I was enticed by the volume of short writeups. A few paragraphs was not only enough, it was the expectation. It was "the bar" before the bar had really been defined. I thought "Oh hell, this looks EASY! I can do better than this without even trying that hard." Short writeups imply a short time contribution. I could see what I was getting myself into - or so I thought.
As I progressed, I invested an ever-increasing time contribution in Everything2. I stopped watching television completely. My social life, what there was of it, disappeared into my web browser. Every spare minute of my day eventually went into reading reading reading E2, talking in the chatterbox or working on my next writeup. Within three months my entire life became focused on my identity as a noder and after a while, a Content Editor. Is this starting to sound familiar to you? Take a look at yourself. If you are successful on E2 today, you are giving a massive time contribution to this web site. Every noder that is well-known from E2's history has made a significant time contribution here. There isn't any other way to do it.
But the one thing that has changed dramatically since "Raising the bar" became the useless dogma that bit the hand of our karma is the amount of time investment required to participate in the game of E2 at the very beginning. This is what graceness is really talking about in her daylog, and it's what so many folks who see today's E2 as a new "golden age" are missing. It's not that there aren't still a lot of people who want to play the game here. It's not that the game has necessarily become "too hard". It's just that there isn't enough time. Not enough time to make a "casual investment" worthwhile. (Without committing to a casual investment, J. Random Newbie isn't going to get hooked on the reward system.) Not enough time to play on E2 and have a life outside of your computer. Not enough available Interweb time between all the other outlets available today that are seeking writers of "mediocre, emotional, teenage content" (to use Auduster's words) that could be crafted into the shining literary athletes that E2 seeks to come running and jump that bar.
A couple of years ago, when I had finally burned out on E2 and needed to find a way to rebuild my life from within, I started seeing a psychotherapist. She was very good, and one of the things that she taught me that would help me grow as a stable, healthy human being was to break my old habits of spending all my spare time in front of the computer, living on the Internet. I needed to get out in the world and establish relationships outside of IRC and the web community I'd immersed myself in completely for four years. Going to nodermeets apparently didn't count. I needed to invest more time in seeking out and participating in social activities, so that's what I did. This has been working well for me, and while breaking my old Internet habits is still an ongoing struggle, the way I budget my time is much more balanced.
I don't have the kind of time to spend on E2 anymore that I used to have. Neither do most of the noders who we all miss so much. They have way too many other demands on their time to make a "career" out of E2. For many of them, Everything2 was just a game, and the time they spent here was spent playing in the nodegel. No disrespect meant to Wiccanpiper, but his statement that "E2 is and always has been about good writing" is a perspective of everything from 2002 and later. While doing "the pleasant work required" to succeed and advance in levels remains of great appeal to some, it is a far different scope of work than E2 required of its userbase in the beginning. "Raising the bar" isn't just about quality - it's about time. If you can't or won't invest the time, you can't play the game. I spent nearly seven straight hours at work just writing this friggin' daylog, and I really can't afford to do that anymore no matter how much I might want to, you know? It really is just that simple.
So it comes down to this: The barrier of participation is too high in terms of time. This is ultimately why we have fewer new users who submit content, and why existing users submit less content. It's why the vast majority of elder established users who still come around to check their messages submit no content. In spite of whatever other reasons you might want to pull out of the hat, which might be just as valid on many levels, at the very core of everything I feel like this is the biggest problem that E2 continues to face. Auduster was smart enough to see that two years ago. I wish I was.
I'd write more, but I'm afraid I'm out of time. Thanks for spending yours on mine.