Post #3: My First Experience With Virtual Communities, or How I Broke the Jeffreylist and Lived to Blush About It Ever-After

Ten years later, I still feel kind of bad about this… 

 

My first experience with virtual communities takes us back to 1999. I was fresh out of high school and full of wishful thinking and wanderlust—and I was also bored. In my boredom, I had taken to surfing the Web and somehow or another, I clicked my way over to the website of a twentysomething hipster from Florida. His name was Jeffrey Howard; he worked at a record store, and cobbled together a fanzine called Kick Bright that had kicked up a bright buzz in the southern-fried indie-rock scene. Kickbrightzine.com kept tabs on the scene and the zine and Jeffrey’s miscellaneous musical adventures, and it also invited visitors to join a mailing list. The purpose of the mailing list was sweet and simple: be the first to know what Jeffrey knows, and keep abreast of shows and releases that were rocking the punked-out peninsula of the Sunshine State.

 

I did not live in Florida. Although I routinely threatened to move to Florida every time Chicago got slugged with yet another subzero winter, I actually had no intentions of ever migrating farther south than The Stadium Formerly Known As Commiskey Park. But I definitely liked music, and the notion of “being the first to know” anything was a temptation that my 18-year-young self simply could not refuse. So I signed up.

 

Now, keep in my mind that this was in the pre-Web 2.0 era. In 1999, there was the Internet, and there were chat rooms, and there were websites. There was no MySpace, no Facebook, no Friendster, no Match.com, no OkCupid, and blogging had yet to take off. If you were a lonely high school student who wanted to meet other lonely people but suffered from a debillitating shyness that woefully left you unable to actually talk to anyone who shared your zipcode, you had to be a little creative. Chat rooms were lame—and, according to your mother, an “evil” alcove of cyberspace that was only inhabited by sexual predators, perverts, and undercover cops—and you had already been there and done that to no great whoop as a precocious preteen. Email, however, was cool. It was something that you were just discovering. It was safe. It was new. It was The Answer.

 

The Kick Bright mailing list was known by the moniker of the Jeffreylist, for obvious reasons. Naïve as this sounds, I didn’t really understand what those words “mailing list” really meant. So I made up my own definition: a mailing list was like a great big group of awesome penpals, and the Jeffreylist was a great big group of awesome penpals who all happened to love bands that most people hadn’t heard of.

 

And I started writing, e-posting my words to my fellow Jeffreylisters. At first, it was all about music…but then I digressed into other things: books, poetry, my life, things I was doing, things that made me nostalgic, things that worried me. I wasn’t writing posts; I was writing letters. And the thing was, people took note. They started actually reading the mail that came to them via the J-List. And they started to write back—with their own words, stories, and non-Florida-punk tangents.

 

I don’t really know what the J-List was like before I stumbled upon it, but it seemed to acquire a fresh new dynamic that summer. Looking back, it seems like the summer of 1999 was the summer that many long-time J-Listers actively reevaluated their level of participation. These changes are best explained by the theoretical frameworks developed by David Lee and Derek Wenmoth. To borrow Lee and Wenmoth’s lingo, people who had been passively “consuming” and “lurking” on the J-List for months finally found the courage to speak up and participate as “learners,” “leaders,” “commentors,” and “contributors”. As a result, the Jeffreylist became a cyber-hub of creative networking and grassroots collaboration. Through increased user participation, the Jeffreylist came to embody the spirit of Ted Rheingold’s “Passion-Based Communities” theory, evolving from a simple mailing list to a networked niche of “like minded people who [had] come together to amplify their passion.”  The J-Listers hailed from all over the world, but what we had in common dwarfed all laws of space and time: energy, sincerity, and passion. We had harnessed the power of Hotmail and Yahoo and founded a vibrant community of our own. Music was the heart and soul of that community, but we traded far more than playlists and record round-ups and rocknroll gossip. We told each other about all the things that made the music meaningful. We told each other what we were doing or eating or thinking or remembering when a certain song came on the radio, and then everything else leaked out: who we were and what we did and what we wanted out of life and why. We traded email and links and websites, but we also traded zines and mixes and t-shirts and care packages via the traditional post. The virtual bonds that were established via the J-List translated beautifully into the real world. J-Listers met up at shows, slept on each other’s floors during cross-country road-trips, fell in love. I’ve lost touch with many of these folks over the years, but in my memory, they are all cast in gold. They are still, to this day, the very best people I have ever known.

 

Unfortunately, the flurry of email that ensued got to be too much for the server and the moderator to handle. Roundabouts 2001, the list went defunct. Jeffrey is still an ultra-cool zine-doing hipster; Kick Bright continues to shine a light on the Orlando scene; and the Kick Bright website was revamped just last month. Jeffrey probably doesn’t remember me, but on the off-chance that he does—well, I hope he remembers me as more than just That Crazy Girl from Chicago Who Broke My Mailing List Cuz She Couldn’t Stop Typing Up Her Life. I know you’re still out there, Jeffrey; and if serendipity leads you to these words, I hope you forgive me. I swear, I never meant to break your mailing list! Honest! 

 

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