Thursday, March 27, 2003

my unlikely adventures in AOL I’m the last person whom I’d ever think of as an AOL user. I’ve never really had a strong opinion about it, but AOL has never really appealed to me. It must be all I’ve heard about it being the dumbed-down internet on training wheels, that is expensive yet full of spam. I’ve been bombarded with their CDs, and have always ignored them, thinking that I’d never try AOL and that it’s such a waste of resources to be distributing all those CDs. Well, maybe there’s some truth to that axiom of marketing about repetition, because I did end up trying AOL. The circumstances were pretty exceptional. I was catsitting for some friends. I wanted to connect to the web with my iBook. I was using Qwest/MSN dsl, which gave me a certain amount of free dial-up access for this type of situation. The trouble was that their dial-up only worked if I used Mac OS 9.2 (apparently this will change when MSN for OS X comes out shortly). Basically I use OS X for everything now, and did not want to be working in the old operating system. That’s when I decided to retrieve one of those AOL CDs from the garbage bin – literally! I knew that they had a relatively new version for OS X and thought that I’d try it. Besides, I was a little curious to find out what their gated internet world was like. Maybe there was something good about it and it was only snobbery that made me shun it. At any rate, this experiment wouldn’t cost me anything if I cancelled the subscription in time. The installation went very smoothly and easily. No complaints there. AOL for Mac OS X has a very visually attractive interface. The animated browser icon looks very cool and liquid-like. I’m a member of a number of different web “communities.” By communities, I mean spaces where you can discuss particular topics and hook-up with people with similar interests/views/experiences. LiveJournal is the first web community which I became involved with. There’s a bewildering number of communities, from librarians to shy people (guess what – nobody says all that much in it!) to all sorts of fan communities. Recently I also joined the Well, one of the oldest internet communities, which predates the web. I did this mainly to support to support Salon, which I do not want to see fold. The Well is a gated community which is centred on on-going discussions of various topics – from libraries again to TV shows such as Buffy to discussions on etiquette, not to mention the ubiquitous discussions on Iraq and other common events. Even blogs are a kind of community – generally way more open and diffuse and less organized than the others I’ve mentioned. But often certain bloggers pay attention to other bloggers, forming a certain loose-knit community. Then are more deliberate attempts to establish blog communities, such as the blawg web ring or the Salon blogs community, both of which I belong to. I mention all this because I think that the main thing that AOL offers are some gated virtual communities. Because AOL has such a large user base, there is a very wide-range of topics and common interests. For example, there isn’t just one Buffy/Angel message board, there are active ongoing discussions about each of the regular characters in the two shows! One thing that makes AOL stand-out is that they make it very easy to become involved in real-time online chats. For example, there are three different chat rooms about the Buffyverse. Of course, it is possible to do all this outside of AOL, but here I admit that it is much easier in AOL. This is one part of the internet which in my mind, needs a bit of simplification. This assumes that one likes chat rooms, and I’m not sure if I do… In fairness, chat rooms are just a different medium which I’m not used to. Blogs and web discussion boards are hardly paragons of thoughtful, considered conversation, but they are when compared with chat rooms. Chat rooms more closely emulate a real discussion. They’re much faster and spontaneous. There can be a number of different threads of conversation operating simultaneously. Maybe if I were better at multi-tasking, I’d get more out of chat rooms. Of course, AOL is meant to be more than just chat rooms, message boards and online communities. There’s all the “content” available – thanks to its troubled merger with Time Warner. I have to say that none of it really impressed me. Maybe one reason might be that Mac users can’t use the AOL Radio feature. But none of AOL’s other content struck me as any better than anything I could find very easily on the free web. But I guess that AOL’s content is simply there – it’s not even a matter of finding it. AOL’s biggest short-coming is its rampant spam. With my previous email accounts (with the exception of hotmail), I was only spammed after I started making my email address available to the outside world – by buying things or filling out forms etc. With AOL, I started getting spammed almost immediately. Worse than that, when I was in chat rooms, I would get spam instant messages, which are even more annoying. I realize that because AOL is the biggest ISP, it’s also the biggest target for spam. I know that it has developed spam control features which I could probably use more effectively. Still, it’s off-putting to be receiving nasty sexual spam within an hour of initially signing onto AOL. Because I had such low expectations of AOL, I ended being slightly impressed. Is it worth the extra money? If you just need internet access, definitely not. If you want the whole AOL experience, especially the chat rooms and other community features, possibly. Other online communities can also cost money, and if they don’t cost money, they may be more difficult to use or require more work. 12:16:29 AM

© Copyright 2003 Morgan Wilson. Last update: 5/14/03; 12:47:45 AM.