NetDynam 2.0

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• Frank Rapport says:

  April 12, 2009 at 6:24 am

  I think you have it mostly right. In a general sense and all. Fine grain would establish sub classes perhaps based on experiential presence, not all of the bbs era is homogeneous, there were subclasses based on hardware, connections and maturity. Usenet groaned under the .edu influx each September and then AOL opened the floodgates. There were superior tools out there that stood far in advance of the general flow both in application and hardware arenas. The gate on some private – elite areas was the expensive USR 9600 modem which guaranteed entrance and speed.
  
  The ISP I belonged to was a custom written BBS that started with five lines. The sixth was a high speed USRobotics 9600 on a private line. The pace of change from 1200 baud through 2400 was fairly gradual but the bypass of the single manufacturer USR9600 by the over 100 manufacturers of 14.4K complete with sysop discounts made for a very rapid change – My ISP shot past 100 lines and finished life – a buyout by a large concern – at just over 500 incoming lines.
  
  Dialup became high speed became cable and the acceleration continued. Whole islands of users languished in AOL and other gathering places paying not only for connection but the dubious add on value of that community and its services.
  
  So, perhaps within generational divides the subclasses contain early adopters, focused participants, content creators, hangers on, leeches, dilettantes, dabblers and the herd.

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  • hoon says:

    April 12, 2009 at 1:44 pm

    Twitter older than it looks
    April 8th, 2009
    Twitter devotees are grayer than one might expect: The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older, according to comScore.
    
    In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.
    
    more at Memex Blog

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  • hoon says:

    April 12, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    I like your subclasses, Frank.
    
    When,albeit briefly held the pot-professional anthro and adult learning semi-portfolio as a staff member for the technical services department at Lakewood Public Library here, the staff was 2/3 twenty-somethings and 1/3 older. That I came to this with computer skills forged over twenty years (1985+) initially surprised my colleagues, yet the digital generational divide was also apparent. It was especially so with respect to the various types of users in the library’s large public computer center.
    
    Meanwhile, I have myself been surprised at how few of my longtime friends are ‘technologically savvy’ and my observations with respect to this group of friends are focused on fifty-something users.

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• Frank Rapport says:

  April 12, 2009 at 4:56 pm

  Well hoon, I also walked in on a staff of similar ages as an off the street volunteer on small but dedicated magazine that interested me. I engaged with this apple centric creative team of writers, staff, layout and design/art groups on an intellectual level that was very satisfying. There was a single pc in the office, a sign perhaps, which allowed me to introduce these cutting edge young professionals to the world of bbs and the internet but only at the ftp/gopher/lynx level. I offered to have a bbs developed for them, create an online zine and just generally move them forward and outwards from their brick and mortar quarterly. The effort was doomed from the start as I think the owner, who had a decade on me, perhaps felt threatened by my enthusiasm and abilities and empathy for the staff, I listened, resisted this at almost all levels despite having the then editor work with me in an unrestricted fashion. The writing on the wall turned into real blood when I walked in on a random day and time and found all the staff in a meeting with a paid consultant about online presence and bbs startup.
  
  In the end not wanting to disrupt what was a good thing I stopped by less and less.
  My final demonstration came when I upgraded my Amiga 3000T to 10M of RAM, 19″
  VGA monitor which I brought in on my way home. I gave them a quick demonstration of a computer which multitasked, when it wasn’t known as a necessity, showing them my bbs, paint programs, word processors, desktop publisher, internet newsgroup and mail,
  general gewgaws all running at the same time within a mere 10M of RAM.
  
  I could have accelerated them to the fore of the online presence that was starting.
  It never happened, another of life’s lessons.
  
  I really have no long term friends – longer than say two decades – who are not computer savvy either at a level commensurate or well past my abilities and almost all are younger than I.

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• EileenKramer says:

  April 13, 2009 at 3:20 pm

  I’ve always been one of the youngest people on the list. I think I’m the youngest of the old timers. I’ve never felt comfortable as a boomer because I was born in 1962. I try to blog at least once a week and sometimes succeed in doing it more often. I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I like MySpace a lot better. I think Twitter is a hoot even though I know it is an odd kind of spam made legitimate. I also like static web sites and site fighting. A lot of official cyberculture refused to look at what ordinary people do on the net. That makes me angry. That means I have to do something about that.

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• simon says:

  April 14, 2009 at 12:42 am

  In academic gerontology we would be dancing around the concept of “cohort.” Thus, if you want to identify a behavior that you find to be age related you must analyze your statistics to show that the behavior appears at somewhat the same age in different generations.
  
  I think people tend to be attracted to the music they listened to as they emerged from adolescence. Now the list members were way past adolescence when they discovered the internet, but for younger people maybe the form of communication popular when they were first given freedom to roam — post adolescence — will be the one they continue to like the best.

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