March
Initiation Into the Digital Mysteries
I met my wife in a CGI chatroom called “Gothica” in 1997. As teenagers of the mid-nineties, we were discovering the joys and pitfalls of crafting a digital identity for the first time in that refreshingly innocent time before kids in black clothes equated to possible mass murderers. The internet was still a novelty to most, though it had been around long enough for the tired “superhighway” concept to have fallen for the more exciting promise of a “virtual reality,” and an elite vetted on telco phreaking and BBSes had long since made the jump to the exciting, 256-colored World Wide Web. Since those first tentative steps across the keyboard and beyond the glowing cathode-ray-tube, I have been fascinated with issues of online sociality, identity, and interaction.
Today I am a web marketer and designer for a small, liberal arts college. erelevant.net was started initially in the Spring of 2006 as a way to explore my profession. I have since realized that being “on-topic” was little better than succumbing to the internet echo-chamber called “higher ed marketing blogs.” There were some good times, certainly. Some good people and some insightful exchanges. Mostly, though, exploring my profession by looking at others in the industry meant receiving someone else’s cold innovation leftovers or, worse, being spoon-fed fads by vendors—these were often sugary and filling but provided little lasting nutrition. (WARNING: Metaphor Change Ahead) There is no “on the bleeding edge.” Electronic marketing bliss will not come from a $19.99, syndicated, podcasted, webinar. Either you work hard and, for a meteoric moment, become the bleeding edge, or you’ve been left behind.
I took a summer hiatus that turned into a year-long absence, and I did allot of thinking.
The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.
