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Originally, I was confused and thought that the ownership and developers of RVillage was some kind of secret. Apparently, I am legally blind and should not be driving a motorhome by any means because the About Us link was right on the front page. Wow, that's a big team! I don't know if it's because I do IT work and websites for a living or if it's because I am just a little weird but whenever I see a website or project I feel like I see it a little differently than a lot of others (especially laymen) do. I tend to deconstruct the sites in my mind and see the various tasks and items it took to create it. Things like carefully chosen UI elements, looking in the HTML source to see whether the developer tended to use CSS ID's or classes. Looking in the CSS and javascript to see if the developers contact info is in there. I'll imagine the database schema behind the project and the number of (way too many probably) iterations it probably took to get it right. I imagine the site going live and the apprehension of the developer(s) hoping that it doesn't die in a fiery server meltdown, is well liked, and importantly is a financial success. I imagine forgetting important things, adding them back in and having it ripple through the project over and over. I imagine the sheer number of hours something can take. It occurs to me that these are very human elements.
[caption align=left caption="The Loneliest Stretch of Road"]
[/caption]The human elements behind projects on the internet can often be forgotten or covered up. And speaking of human elements, the human connections are behind what makes the internet such a powerful force. Humor my need to go off on a crazy tangent... Long ago there were things called BBS's. BBS's were relatively tiny computer networks, usually run in someone's bedroom or basement. Their computer had a device called a "modem" attached. For anyone under 20, this is a device that attached to a phone line and made and received sounds on the phone line (instead of voice) to transmit and receive data. This process was slow so instead of fancy graphics just textual screens were transmitted. BBS's were programs that answered the phone automatically when someone else called and allowed people to leave messages, play games (anyone remember Tradewars?!), download files and if the BBS had more than one phone line, chat in real time with another user. BBS's (and the early internet for other reasons) were very special to me at least for a very arbitrary reason. Because telephone companies charged long distance back then, people tried to call BBS's that were a local call to them. Thus the people you would find posting messages or playing games on a BBS were all but guaranteed to be local to you - VERY local. It doesn't take a large stretch of the imagination to imagine a 15 year old living on a long rural road with no car and no easy way to escape very far finding new friends through such a medium. And it is how I found my best friend who I've now known for sheesh almost 20 years. How did I get so old?
As the internet came to be, BBS's bit the dust but the human connection was still pretty much alive. AOL Instant Messenger had directories of people and chat rooms where you could search through random people and bug them - and people did so! I don't recall if it was city and state or zipcode, but you could put location information in and seek out people really close to you. Man the ex girlfriends, the random conversations I've had with all manner of people were great. Such wonderful memories. And people were a little err "cleaner" then and you didn't find the nightmare images you could find on Chat Roulette as time went by. Early myspace allowed you to seek out new people by interest and their profiles were open to all to see. What many people found hideous in MySpace.... Whacky pages hyper personalized to each individual's horrid design sense... I found to be such an amazing thing. In general the 90's and early 2000's were a magical time for networked communications as people were open and new connections were a simple process.
But things change, people get stalked, people get abused and privacy becomes a hot issue. Myspace and its open nature gives way to the closed nature of Facebook where making new connections with people you haven't met in person is much more difficult. People get googled on job interviews and all manner of posted information gets used against people in various ways. The internet gets reduced to those who enjoy life and post their accomplishments on a sanitized white and blue page and sharing amazing things with their friends and the other 90% of the people who wish that dude would stop bragging about how awesome they are. Creativity is reduced to a stupid Instagram filter on a crappy cell phone camera picture. Nothing could be more tragic to me.
Besides the abandonment of free and open communication with new people on the average internet social network, RVers have yet another hurdle to overcome. How do I, Mark, collector of vintage computers, lover of old BMW's, person whose life goal is to drive every road course in America, rider of motorcycles at speeds that might be *slightly* above the legal limit (to the untrained eye because those who know me know I would *never* speed, find people like me.... When I move around ALL the time? The fact is, full time RVers are a pretty unique crowd just to begin with. And as unique as we are, the differences between us are astounding. Look across the park you are in. One person has a 1985 5th wheel. The other person has a horrendous quality but brand new Fleetwood motorhome. The next person has a special lovingly procured fiberglass egg camper. They sit outside by the fire before they retire to their tent sized space. They perhaps never watch tv and and enjoy hiking and survival preparation. Right next to them might be a million dollar Prevost owned by a CEO who spends 10 hours a day on the phone at his desk watching his 60" LCD TV and each one of them loves every minute of his or her completely unique and entirely different life. With the full time RVing crowd, looks are deceiving, everyone is new and you never know who you really want to talk to at all!
This leads me to where I fit in. When I lived in my sticks and bricks home my one neighbor, an overbearingly friendly 79 year old who insisted that I was his friend because I was his neighbor, would talk to me on a regular basis. That's fine, and I don't mind the interaction but you cannot imagine how big of an enemy I became when I bought and parked a motorhome in my driveway. Wow. Years have taught me that while I am not outwardly social I still crave social interaction of LIKE MINDED individuals. What some people might find to be introversion in me is actually a desire to avoid people who are quite frankly a waste of my time (and likewise I am a waste of their time). If I have no common ground with you and we have no similarities in our interest, background, age and more, why are we talking!? That's just me and I know others are different. Personally I'd love to meet the Technomadia team of Chris and Cherie. I'd love to meet the Botts of Outside Our Bubble and check out David's awesome quadcopter, live streaming setup, and other things and talk about the fact that we both independently came up with the exact same idea (a live shot out the front of our RV's uploaded to the internet). These two particular couples actually run blogs and I'd still be hard pressed to know where they are at without carefully reading the posts.
A site like RVillage changes everything though. It allows discovery by location. You can see the people who are near where you are at and find connections. It allows discovery by interest. Thoughtful personal profile questions have been created to allow you to discover people who you would actually be interested in talking to... Even better it allows you to find jumping off points to converse about. Certainly better than meekly approaching someone's Wanderlodge while they are neck deep in yet another repair and asking them "Hey what kind of bus is that?". It helps people who may not necessarily be social butterflies to.... be social butterflies. And that's awesome!
I can only hope that the site doesn't go the way of Facebook though... with closed up cliques of people who know each other, inherently closed to newcomers. It's such a boring way to be, all to avoid a minute amount of personal risk. I firmly believe that when it comes to being open about who you are, where you are at and what you like, the juice is worth the squeeze.
PS: The image is of route 135 between Riverton, Wyoming and Rawlins Wyoming. This was by far the loneliest emptiest (yet beautiful and serene) stretch of road we have been on thus far. The mountain ahead was the steepest climb we experienced anywhere.
Last modified: 21 October, 2014
Created: 17 March, 2014