Last year, while trying to research the concept of the Shopping Citadel and its related variants, I began to come across a number of references to the 1960s Counterculture, Silicon Valley, and all the research that later went into the Digital Realm. I did not pay too much attention to its significance in The Third Place (1st Ed.), concluding that it should be discussed either in another Treatise or in a future Blog post. It has been suggested in this area of my research that there once existed an earlier period in the Digital Realm, prior to the World Wide Web (WWW), when the Digital Realm was more communal and tight-knit than it is in these times. After writing The Digital Realm (1st Ed.) earlier this year, I decided to investigate the matter further to separate the myths from the facts. My hope is that by revisiting the past, I will be able to figure out where the National Intranet fits into the grand scheme of things.
In today’s WWW, most of what goes on happens to be concentrated into a handful of eCommerce platforms and “Social Networking sites” (the latter does not have anything in common with the Social Media of the National Intranet). Gone are the days in which people of similar interests coalesced around websites that catered to those interests. Also gone are the days in which other people could engage in productive dialogues in communities where everyone knows everyone. Arguably the best example that I had found was from an early WordPress post in 2004, where it mentioned a 1985 Usenet discussion where people wrote about the Y2K Bug. I know I wrote about that discussion elsewhere, but it is discussions like those that I feel are sorely lacking in the WWW, and this has only gotten worse because of those Social Networking.
Sure, there were some who initially did not believe that a problem would emerge from using a two-digit year format instead of a four-digit year format as a cost-cutting measure. Who else in 1985 would have thought that a potential problem could emerge from doing this? The doubts lingered throughout much of late January until someone was able to confirm that, yes, computers running on two-digit year formatting will behave as if January 1, 2000 is “January 1, 1900.”
There are some notable benefits of having discussions conducted in this manner. For one thing, it leaves a record of the discussion so that the information left in the discussion could be helpful to somebody else in the future. Someone might have a problem that somebody else experienced twenty or so years ago and the information therein remains as valid now as it was then. An entire community of people could grow up around a shared interest or passion, beyond the spatial geography of their own municipality or region. The message board forum was where the Digital Realm shines and why I have long maintained that Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and so forth are terrible replacements.
It turns out that there is empirical evidence showing that the traditional discussion board forum is far more benefit than the array of Social Networking sites. A 2015 study discovered that the discussion board forum is less hazardous to personal mental health than Social Networking:
“In the study, users were approached on a range of online discussion forums catering to a variety of interests, hobbies and lifestyles. Those recruited to the study were classified in two groups: those whose forum subject could be considered stigmatised (such as those dealing with mental health issues, postnatal depression or a particular parenting choice for example) or non-stigma-related forums (such as those for golfers, bodybuilders and environmental issues).
They were asked a set of questions relating to their motivations for joining the discussion forum, the fulfilment of their expectations, their identification with other forum users, their satisfaction with life and their offline engagement with issues raised on the forum.
Lead author Dr Louise Pendry of the University of Exeter said: ‘Our findings paint a more optimistic picture of old-style online discussion forums. Often we browse forums just hoping to find answers to our questions. In fact, as well as finding answers, our study showed users often discover that forums are a source of great support, especially those seeking information about more stigmatising conditions. Moreover, we found that users of both forum types who engaged more with other forum users showed a greater willingness to get involved in offline activities related to the forum, such as volunteering, donating or campaigning.’
Dr Jessica Salvatore of Sweet Briar College, USA, added: ‘What we are seeing here is that forum users who get more involved develop strong links with other users. They come to see themselves as more identified with other forum users. And then these more identified users see the greatest benefits, in terms of positive links with mental health and getting involved offline. In a nutshell, the more users put into the forum, the more they get back, and the pay-off for both users themselves and society at large can be significant.’”
Granted, most discussion board forums still rely on anonymity, but I feel that this has more to do with the desire to preserve Personal Privacy in the Digital Realm and the WWW in particular. One could get a feel for the discussion board forum by interacting with its members and understanding them and why they are members. As soon as one gets acclimated and recognized as a member of the community, one acquires a sense of purpose and belonging. And while there will always be the usual confrontations and squabbling among its members, offline communities are no exception.
For all the benefits of a message board forum, why have they been replaced by Social Networking sites? The image that comes to mind is what the German-speaking world once called the “Landflucht” (Flight from the Land), where people abandoned the countryside and went to the emerging world-cities or the former East Germany to West Germany. Like the countryside that exists offline, communities on message board forums disintegrated and withered as their members flocked to the digital world-cities. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and others are the Digital Realm’s equivalents of world-cities in the WWW, reflections of the sort of Cosmopolitanism that would never have occurred on the average message board forum in the 2000s, let alone the 1990s or the 1980s.
The Spenglerian concept of a world-city is defined by a massive metropolitan area whose continued existence cannot be sustained without feeding on the livelihoods of surrounding regions. It is not so much the question of basic necessities like food and water but the question of who will keep everything going. That is where the concept of the Fourth Estate emerged, that Proletariat who find themselves as “city-dwellers” forced surrender their Arbeit for Kapital or risk receiving enough Schuld to become destitute.
What I see in the major Social Networking sites is a digital simulation of the same problems, a recreation of ones which also exist offline. On those sites, everyone is a stranger and any meaningful sense of community is absent. I have had my fair share of the trivial discussions, the senseless drivel, and the social alienation over there. Nothing productive ever came out of those places in my personal experiences. Mindless escapism is oftentimes the norm, making genuinely authentic discussions almost impossible to envisage. Other times, there is a “bystander effect” at play where people do not understand the significance of a problem or they have find that it is more convenient to be a passive observer than an active participant.
As for the message board forums, there are still around, even if they do continue to dwindle in number with each passing year. I am sure that there will be another migration of people away from those Social Networking sites someday. It happened to MySpace before, it is already happening to Facebook and Twitter as people, and I am sure places like Reddit and Discord will be next someday.
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The Fourth Estate 
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