A Million Keys

In the 1990s, I was a frequent reader of Usenet, a collection of Internet discussion boards called newsgroups, whose history stretches back a decade before the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1991. Social phenomena that would later become part of the Web already existed in prior incarnations on Usenet: there were local city groups that functioned like Craigslist today, others devoted to file-sharing and tech tips, and many clustered around certain professions, hobbies and pop culture topics like music, television, and film. Usenet was a text-based phenomenon, like early email, direct dial-in bulletin boards, and IRC, the live chat protocol that likewise predates the Web; all of these structures were replicated in some form within the gated communities of contemporaneous commercial services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. This loosely interconnected congeries of systems provided the linguistic biome where the peculiarly telegraphic cant of online culture first flourished and evolved into a new mode that operated between writing and speech; years before the Web, these were the places where colon-dash-parenthesis began to signify a smile or a frown, where “spam” and “troll” took on new meanings, and where users learned to type ROTFL and LOL while staring, physically impassive, at a screen.