This piece in Wired on The Well was very interesting.

For a lot of people, five or six hours a day online was as good as their social life got. If the wired world was a response to the breakdown of physical community, then this wasn’t such a bad place to be. And some people were turning to The Well precisely because they could avoid real life encounters that way. These people, who might be too timid to strike up a conversation with a bank teller, became animated and voluble online. “A lot of people didn’t know what they were looking for until they found it on The Well,” observes Cliff Figallo, another alumnus of The Farm, who built the original computer closet for the VAX and became user 19, with the login (fig). Fig, who began as The Well’s comptroller, was shy by nature and afraid at first of typing something that might be criticized or laughed at or, worse, ignored. “When you post something it’s like standing up at a public meeting for the first time,” Fig says. But he discovered that his experience mirrored that of others: “When people made a good connection, they found that they could follow up on it easily and get some momentum going, get deeper, get loose.”

On the face of it, The Well is described as being a lot like how Tumblr is now. It’s an online community composed of all types of people, at first primarily of those tech savvy few in the mid 80s. It started quite small and grew through word of mouth and heavy press coverage. It was an addictive, always-on medium for its users. There were some differences, though, which I think illuminate some of Tumblr’s shortcomings.

How different was this from neighbors gossiping over the back fence about their own closed, self-referential sphere? For one thing, the medium was text. Not since the days when people corresponded daily by letter had the written word carried such freight in quotidian life. For another, the communications on The Well often generated, through their very intensity, the type of hurt feelings usually reserved for familial disputes; such was the fallout from this strange intimacy The Well provoked - at once public and solitary.

Tumblr certainly fosters a strong community. But since it allows for multi-media, it doesn’t emphasize the written word. Maybe it’s a function of how I’m using Tumblr these days, but I don’t notice as many reblog-versations going on. There is dialogue among certain users I follow, but it’s not the kind of dialogue you’d get through a series of emails, for instance. There’s not an intensity of and focus for moving the ball down the field, as it were.

McClure played around with a spreadsheet, trying to figure out the absolute minimum The Well could charge users and still pay the bills. He and Brand decided on a monthly fee of $8, plus $2 an hour, with the novel idea of decreasing it over time.

The Well also cost money. Beside the not inconsiderable cost of owning a computer twenty-five years ago, there was a monthly and hourly fee for The Well. And The Well’s networking hardware failed. Its computer went down. A fail whale that you paid for.

I like the diverging austerity of The Well. It had a maniacal focus on text and dialogue. You had to pay to be there. It was a deep community in which everyone was conceivably connected—you didn’t have to friend, follow, or subscribe to other users. These facets make me think The Well was ‘better’ than Tumblr, at least as far as intellectual progress is concerned. It was like a crucible, or an adult day care facility for chronic overthinkers.

Technology changes so much and quickly, but people don’t. The Wired piece focuses generally on one person who is

1. a prolific talker
2. a finder of love online
3. an abusive asshole
4. a liveblogger of his demise

I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I’ve done online in the five months since my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn’t going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocate us. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line… I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn’t really have to leave… Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space

I think we all might not live with an eye toward death, at least not always, but it seems to be the sedimented reasoning behind this present-everywhere post/refresh/post cycle. Manic and ever, like a deranged bicycle wheel that’s overcome Newton’s first law.

Maybe what I’m precisely looking for is a message board or a bigger rolodex, but reading this piece I couldn’t help but see Tumblr’s past and its future, maybe. I’m finding little to say these days, so I don’t say much. I can’t very well get down on other people for reblogging without comment, liking without reading, or posting all those dog photos. But constant, thoughtful progress by means of text has done better than middlingly well for us so far, and Tumblr seems like it could be another vehicle for it.