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I was over at GreatestJournal and noticed a kerfluffle over the sudden limitation of usable icons. Apparently, because of the strain placed upon the GJ servers by the ponderous fandom exodus from LJ, the admins have limited users to 100 icons and disabled notifications and PMs. The 100-icon limit is a steep decline from the 2,000 they so happily advertised to woo new members, and many longtime GJers are unhappy. Not at the admins, but at the fandom diaspora. The Internet truly is a microcoosm of human behavior.
During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Tallahassee was a waystation for refugees, and for a week or so, the city infrastructure buckled under the strain of the unexpected population surge. It's a town that operates at 100,000 people at its peak and 30,000 between semesters, and the local news at the time reported that as many as 500,000 displaced people from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast were here. With five times the demand, the utilities wavered badly, and for 48 hours, all non-essential lighting and equipment was turned off. The grocery stores and malls operated with minimal lighting, and it was surreal to be browsing the mall in the dark, with no music or TVs or video game consoles beckoning you from the storefront.
What was most interesting, though, was the reaction of the locals. Most were sympathetic and eager to help at first because we were aware of how easily it could've been us, and well, in the South, you're raised to be "neighborly" even if you'd rather not, so the town did what it could. Oh, the fatass alumni bitched when the hotels cancelled their ballgame bookings in order to accommodate refugees, but they put a sock in it quickly when, for once, local sentiment wasn't with them.
After a while, though...well, neighborly impulses have a short shelf life, and after a week of congested roads, frequent power failures, and threadbare grocery stores, folks started to grumble. Sure, they were sorry for those who had lost everything, and as good Christians, they prayed they'd find new homes. They just hoped they wouldn't find them here. After all, it was tragic what had happened to them, but the locals had lives to lead, lives that were being inconvenienced by outsiders' misery. After two weeks, the welcoming signs came down, and the locals waited for the refugees to move on. Eventually, most of them did, and by late September, the alumni were once again kings of the road in their lumbering RVs.
Clearly, there is no equality between the travesty of Katrina and her aftermath and the loss of icons on the Internet, that toy of the idly disenfranchised. But that both events can inspire similar feelings of entitlement and possessiveness fascinates me. Humans are inherently selfish creatures, and there is no better proving ground for this than the Internet.
We locals were peripherally inconvenienced by the flow of human traffic from Katrina, but it took less than a week for that minor discomfort to overshadow-at least in the dim sub-basement of the city psyche-the devastating losses faced by thousands of people. Their losses mattered less than our potential discomforts because we were still comfortable and well-fed and TV coverage had done much to numb us to the scope and humanity of the disaster. We wanted them gone because we were here first, never mind that a great number of "us" were only here for as long as it took to get our degrees. It was like a mammoth game of King of the Hill, and we wanted "our" town the way it was. The notion of "ours", of ownership, carries enormous weight in society, and on the Intetnet as well as in the real world, possession is nine-tenths of unspoken law.
The GJers are rankled because fen who have elected to leave LJ are crashing their carefully ordered party. They're weighing down servers and upsetting the established zen of the GJ community that was in full swing long before LJers turned up with their dirty faces and grabby hands. Resources are being curtailed and redistributed to cope with the changing virtual landscape, and some are unhappy. They want the wanderers to "go home and leave us alone." They feel a sense of ownership and entitlement to something that doesn't really exist beyond servers in California and isn't really theirs to begin with. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not a good goddamn; no one is starving or dying for want of user icons, but it's fascinating to watch such disparate situations evoke such similar responses.
During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Tallahassee was a waystation for refugees, and for a week or so, the city infrastructure buckled under the strain of the unexpected population surge. It's a town that operates at 100,000 people at its peak and 30,000 between semesters, and the local news at the time reported that as many as 500,000 displaced people from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast were here. With five times the demand, the utilities wavered badly, and for 48 hours, all non-essential lighting and equipment was turned off. The grocery stores and malls operated with minimal lighting, and it was surreal to be browsing the mall in the dark, with no music or TVs or video game consoles beckoning you from the storefront.
What was most interesting, though, was the reaction of the locals. Most were sympathetic and eager to help at first because we were aware of how easily it could've been us, and well, in the South, you're raised to be "neighborly" even if you'd rather not, so the town did what it could. Oh, the fatass alumni bitched when the hotels cancelled their ballgame bookings in order to accommodate refugees, but they put a sock in it quickly when, for once, local sentiment wasn't with them.
After a while, though...well, neighborly impulses have a short shelf life, and after a week of congested roads, frequent power failures, and threadbare grocery stores, folks started to grumble. Sure, they were sorry for those who had lost everything, and as good Christians, they prayed they'd find new homes. They just hoped they wouldn't find them here. After all, it was tragic what had happened to them, but the locals had lives to lead, lives that were being inconvenienced by outsiders' misery. After two weeks, the welcoming signs came down, and the locals waited for the refugees to move on. Eventually, most of them did, and by late September, the alumni were once again kings of the road in their lumbering RVs.
Clearly, there is no equality between the travesty of Katrina and her aftermath and the loss of icons on the Internet, that toy of the idly disenfranchised. But that both events can inspire similar feelings of entitlement and possessiveness fascinates me. Humans are inherently selfish creatures, and there is no better proving ground for this than the Internet.
We locals were peripherally inconvenienced by the flow of human traffic from Katrina, but it took less than a week for that minor discomfort to overshadow-at least in the dim sub-basement of the city psyche-the devastating losses faced by thousands of people. Their losses mattered less than our potential discomforts because we were still comfortable and well-fed and TV coverage had done much to numb us to the scope and humanity of the disaster. We wanted them gone because we were here first, never mind that a great number of "us" were only here for as long as it took to get our degrees. It was like a mammoth game of King of the Hill, and we wanted "our" town the way it was. The notion of "ours", of ownership, carries enormous weight in society, and on the Intetnet as well as in the real world, possession is nine-tenths of unspoken law.
The GJers are rankled because fen who have elected to leave LJ are crashing their carefully ordered party. They're weighing down servers and upsetting the established zen of the GJ community that was in full swing long before LJers turned up with their dirty faces and grabby hands. Resources are being curtailed and redistributed to cope with the changing virtual landscape, and some are unhappy. They want the wanderers to "go home and leave us alone." They feel a sense of ownership and entitlement to something that doesn't really exist beyond servers in California and isn't really theirs to begin with. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not a good goddamn; no one is starving or dying for want of user icons, but it's fascinating to watch such disparate situations evoke such similar responses.