In high school, I was a nerd. I still am a nerd, but given the cultural climate I blend in a lot easier. It's been fun.
It was 2002 and we as a people were on the cusp of whats been called the "nerd renessance". I hate that term and almost everything associated with it, however I've been unable to come up with anything better. My high school wasn't necessarily bursting with people wearing thick glasses, but for some reason, people took interest in what I was doing on the computers. Even a few of the football players had blogs.
The term "blog" hadn't entered the American lexicon yet, but places like livejournal and xanga were growing by the thousands. I was still deep in what was called the "everything/nothing" community, so I was constantly asked about "computer help".
"Everything/nothing", or "e/n" for short, was what I consider the genesis of the internet craze. They were pretty much what blogs/twitter/tumblr/facebook are now, but with fewer pictures of food. People would post random silly things, macro images, and stories about their day. The biggest difference was there were close knit groups of people that linked to each others page, and some were even friends "IRL" (in real life ;)
I spent most of my high school years trying my hardest to get into ANY of these groups, but they were pretty closed off. It certainly wasn't as easy as, "hey, follow me and I'll follow you back!". Unless you got their attention by pure happenstance, you could forget getting your website "plugged". Plugging is basically a link advertising your page, and the owner of said page saying, "Hey, check this guy out".
Back then contact was made by way of IRC chat, which was like AIM, or Facebook messenger. No one used their real name, and most people even had clever nick names. No one was scared to show their face, in fact most people had live streaming webcams from their rooms/office, 24 hours a day. Chris Pirillo is one of the few people that still do this, and he has taken it to quite the next level (http://www.pirillo.com).
If you WERE lucky enough to get your page plugged, your page hits would jump up by the thousands over night. I tried everything, plugging them myself and constantly commenting on their posts saying how awesome they were. It didn't help. If anything, it just made them upset.
I tried almost everything. I even sat in IRC for days with out saying anything, then casually trying to enter the conversation. Nothing. No one even responded to me. I can't remember anything I said exactly, but in hindsight I'd imagine my tender age of 15 was pretty transparent which was probably one of the reasons I wasn't accepted into their group.
You had to be careful, though, because if you pushed them or annoyed them too much, you'd be labeled a spammer, or a troll. While they are two separate things, they are both equally as hurtful to someone not trying to do either, and just gain respect or the almighty "plug". While spamming is as simple "Send the same message indiscriminately to (large numbers of recipients) on the Internet.". Trolling is damn near an art form.
As much as I hate it, I do have this odd level of respect for the sophisticated troll, and even applauded and laughed at some of their efforts. It is mostly harmless, so there is nothing to worry about, but damn can it be annoying.
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