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Then we should stop this thread. Now. This discussion means nothing but face time for her, and there are few who deserve it less.
posted by aaron at 3:06 PM on April 24, 2001
"And the feeling’s crawling in that the Internet as we know it is somehow dead end Neanderthal technology, like Betamax. Beyond the fizzing meaningless fringes where thoughts turn to dust and fractals, a different kind of communications technology is waiting. Somewhere on the other side of pure green dissolution, where Wilber’s ‘yellow’ integrative meme culture will emerge, there is no ‘Internet’, no radioactive VDUs, no carpal-tunneling mice to manoeuvre and most importantly, there is access to a functioning global mind that fuelled by something other than caffeine and charlie and hormones unleashed.Hmm, It does look nice outside today...
Until that day, who could fail to see in the Internet, the great Ring-Pass-Not for the Rational Consumerist mind, where sense dissolves into incoherence and anxious questions about questions unravel without end ? In this Ghost Garden, as we’ve seen, unfounded rumour can provoke international panic as real as any boring old Martian invasion. Debates unfurl for days based on hearsay or lonely speculation or on the sighting of weird information spooks and roaming ‘rumours’..
Here, at the global schizoid party, everyone can be shouted down.
Here is where someone disagrees with us and we try to make them agree but they never do and never will and we should have known that before we got started...and oh christ the music’s insane...
Here at the limit, is where the sacred sovereign Self, the pinnacle of the last 300 years of social evolution, disintegrates into memes and cogwheels, dust and pish.
SILENCE THE INTERNET!"
I have always assumed (Incorrectly, it seems) that all sorts of accolades had already been heaped upon the [Fray]...
Well, there's no question the site's had plenty of accolades in its time. Whether it's received an amount of attention proportional to what it's accomplished, and/or proportional to other sites of equal accomplishment, is a matter of personal opinion.
My guess is it probably hasn't received as much acclaim as others have. I know that in my online travels over the years, I've seen very little ever mentioned about the Fray, in terms of mass-media mentions or links from other sites. Compared to the never-ending gushfests about every other site out there comprised of such a high proportion of A-lister (there are no A-listers™) contributions, the Fray isn't even on the same map.
I can only speculate about the likely reason: its design. Every time I go there, the site makes me, as a reader, feel like an outsider. The front page says nothing about what the site is for; almost nothing that is on that page makes any overt sense to anyone who isn't already familiar with The Fray. The About link is hidden at the bottom of the page, precisely where most people would expect to find the copyright/terms&conditions link (in other words, the absolute last place anyone would ever want to click unless they were paying close attention to the Javascript onMouseOver message ... if they even had Javascript running). You just get no idea what The Fray is about, unless you actually start digging in. And most people simply won't dig in under those rules. They think it must be something they either can't understand or, worse, that it's been intentionally designed so they won't understand it because the content's only intended for the group of contributors, not for them.
These sorts of design quirks don't matter much as long as your buzz is good amongst the Web/blogging community. We all know what The Fray is; many of the members of this community are contributors, so it will always be known, understood, and referenced here. But what about the rest of the world, including the members of the mass media who would otherwise be heaping the same accolades? I think a lot of those people just are not getting it.
Anyway, this is not a slam of any sort against the Fray; I think the content is excellent, as is the design on the stories themselves. But I honestly have gotten disoriented and confused by the site every single time I've ever gone there over the years. And the first couple times long ago, before I started bopping around the same online communities as many of its creators, I honestly could not grok what it was about or who it was for. So I figure this may have something to do with the relative lack of recognition it has received over time.
posted by aaron at 11:18 PM on April 26, 2001
posted by anildash at 11:25 AM on April 24, 2001