The egg is fractured and that’s not a bad thing

Holly posted something on Book Binge that caught my interest and as I got ready to comment there, I realized that there was no way I could without getting totally carried away, so I’m posting my response. Hopefully, this is a good thing.

Anyway, it’s the first part of her post that fascinated me:

I’m just curious..how many of you keep up with the happenings at places like RWA, AAR, RTB, Avon Authors and etc?

Personally? I don’t visit them at all. Or rarely, I suppose. If I’m directed there, sure, I’ll check it out, but I don’t make a habit of it.

As a reader, I’m much more interested in what other readers have to say about books, authors, etc. I don’t like to keep my finger in every Romance pie out there. I just like to read.

Maybe I’m somewhat lazy, or maybe I’m a bit more discerning than others, but I don’t go to AAR or RWA for book/author recs. I go to The Good, The Bad and The Unread or Dear Author or Where’s My Hero or Rowena, Isabel, Jazz, Daph, Ames, Mailyn, CindyS, Nath, Devon, Lori (who almost always feels the same as me about books), my favorite book pimp Casee or any other number of romance-related blogs/sites/etc out there.

Am I missing something, though? Am I hurting myself by not checking AAR and RWA every day, looking for new stuff to read? For new recs? For new Author-type drama or Rabid Fangirls galore? I don’t feel like I am. I feel like I read a good balance of new and old authors, different sub-genre’s. I was a little slow to jump on the eBook bandwagon, but now that I’m here I’m not getting off anytime soon. Am I alright sticking with sites I know, love and am comfortable with? Or do I need to branch out?

I can so identify with what she’s saying. To be honest, I think a lot of us can. In fact, I honestly believe what Holly is talking about here, sensing here is exactly the “fracturing” that I’ve been observing and commenting on for several months now. The thing is that many time when I bring it up, people seem to think it’s a bad thing and it isn’t. I certainly don’t mean it that way.

How to explain it though.

I’m certainly not an expert on the evolution of the Internet but I do know that it has evolved and I’ve been here for more than a decade. In that time, I was part of a service called AOL and then moved outward onto the broader Internet itself. The significant point is that AOL, and services like it, at that time was a more or less closed community that offered people a way to get onto the web, relatively safely and securely. Through them, people could access relatively instantly something they had never had access to before – other people around the world.

And that was fine for me and others for a while. It served a need. It was safe. It offered that sense of community where we could find other people with like interests and hobbies. Where we could search out information as we needed it. Where we could access the broader services available on the web but without the threat posed by all the “things” that might be out there waiting for us. Whatever they were.

You have to understand. Most us had little to no knowledge of what the heck the Internet even was at that point. Some of us still don’t. Whatever.

And then something major happened. Some of us started realizing that there really was more to the Internet than just what was “inside” AOL. That one could actually get “on the web” without going through AOL. So we moved outside that safe community and started exploring the broader Internet. Heck, we even gave up that AOL subscription and simply got an ISP. We were on our own to “browse” the web.

Now at this point, some of you are thinking, “Well, duh.” Stick with me because this is crucial thinking for what I’m going to get to in a moment. The interesting thing is that many of the people I “met” within the AOL romance community are still around in one form or another. Some of the organizations are too. I couldn’t tell you what they were, though.

The point is that when I left the “safety and security” of AOL, I looked around for other romance communities to join. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do. It’s something we’ve been trained to do. It’s our egg instinct. There were several romance sites and forums that came and went in those first years. One of ones that stuck is AAR. It is a community to be proud of but it is still a community first and foremost and that’s an important point to remember. A one-stop place for romance readers to get everything they needed online, including controversy. More or less. 😉

So the era of the romance “communities” began online. I’d like to say there were many but in reality I’m not all that sure there were. There are probably only a dozen or so that truly stayed strong enough to be viable for any length of time. I used to have a list of them and I’m definitely going to be checking that list to see which ones are still active but to be honest I’m not very hopeful that many are.

With the advent of blogs and blogging online, we are entering another new era, however. Actually, we’re not entering it. It’s here. Period. This doesn’t mean that more community focused sites are going to go away. At least not right away. And some of them may change and adapt. Who knows. What Holly is describing, though, is exactly the sense that the multitude of reader blogs make it possible for readers to visit with each other outside of those relative closed communities that have always existed. That is nothing against those sites. It’s just a simple fact that people’s needs change over time.

Is one way of doing things right and one way wrong? I honestly don’t know. I suppose one could argue that blogging is more what the Internet is about in that it’s like a living, breathing web that branches here and there while the communities tend to keep people in one place. Except I also tend to believe that ignores the needs of newbies for safety and security when they first get on the web. Strong communities are needed for individuals to find their feet and provide a gateway to those new landscapes. Like the blogosphere. So maybe there’s a place for both.