Moderator's Musings
by Nygdan
ATS Weekly, Edition 012, October 4, 2005
Likening our board to a galaxy is rather apt. There are clusters with individual characteristics, peculiarities, and inhabitants, like our
forums.. Between these forums are the same modes of relationship that you'd expect in any populous and civilized galaxy. Some members are cancerous
and parasitic trolls, taking up everyone's attention but not really giving anything in return. Rivalry and competition abounds between posters with
vastly different and sometimes colliding world views. There are even deep undercurrents of serious distrust between people who consider themselves
radicals of one side of the political spectrum and people who consider themselves radicals of the other side of the political spectrum. Fortunately
there is also sinecere benevolence and altruistic work between members, allowing us to have grown frmo a mere disucssion site to an incredibly
interactive, user-provided content-driven constellation of web-based stars.
There is the uneven distribution of resources that are the datapoints of any geographical study or planetary survey. Resources like talent, skill,
rationality, education, knowledge, conciseness, experience, eloquence, conscientiousness, and moderation. No member has all these abilities and
resources in full bloom as an individual. Like in a galaxy, an individual has to roam far, sometimes invisibly lurking and silently observing.
Eventually bringing together these resources in the proper portions by networking with other posters who have one or two of these resources in excess.
Patience has to be yielded up along with heavy, thick doses of tolerance and understanding in order to prevent catastrophes. Flamewars, novae
explosions with far more heat and energy than light and illumination. The collapse of something big and complex into a messy, dense, irreversibly
devouring black hole, such as the tit-for-tat exchanges that many politicized topics can fall into. The brutal battering of fields of iron meteorites
that require thick skins to survive. Or the nervously disordered repeated signalling of a quasar from members who have stared too long into the abyss
and cracked upon seeing what stared back.
When it works tho, when the mixture of posters and personalities produce something stellar, all things are in due proportion. The good are along
with the bad. The massive and stony are in their proper relationship to the brilliant and airy. Sporadically visiting erractics flash in; then
continue on their eccentric, pointless, lonely journey. The revealing context exists, such that correctly placed moons reflect the penetrating light
of central suns. At those moments you have something like what we're all looking for; a healthily inhabited solar system of posters and their
interesting and revelatory threads. And that is just a small part of it.
You might have to wander, even patrol, a long ways, breaking stones, kicking away foggy clouds, handling dense cores with thick gloves, but
eventually you do manage to come across another such planetary system. Then another and another and eventually you need maps to make sense of it all.
You need to input feeds into entire programs to keep track of all the maps that come out of this bgoard, with its multiple forums and news outlets and
audio broadcasts and speacial projects. To be able see everything that you've observed in an ordered array. To trackback to the original sources of
information should the need arise.
The galaxy analogy is apt; its useful, its descriptive. It rings of truth, toning like a hollow moon struck by an alien lander. It tolls out into
the sometimes black and often gray Inbetween, barely perceptible. All it takes is the proper arrangement, the proper mixture of good and intelligent
posters creating thoughtful and incisive content, for that galactic view of this board to come roaring back, as loud as when first struck. A signal
relating the before to the now, the there to here, linking links far beyond a simple web on a single portion of a simple planet.
The galactic analogy that you build-up becomes so integral that you only get brief, darting views of it. Its too much to keep in mind when
participating in an individual discussion or volunteering for an individual project or game contest that you come acroos. You have to be reminded of
it, on occasions where you are propelled off it, to a stellar view. Where you can sit back and just look at the massive edifice we've all made and
continue to make with each post and comment, when you can flit about observing the spinning disc, before plummeting back into the apt analogy again.
Nygdan
ATS Moderator
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