IRL? JK

I'm not much of a writer nor do I play one on the radio but I do know this -- I have an idea and good as dollars to donuts I'm just going to lay it out. And caution: I'm not a Broadway kind of guy. Live action plays make me anxious because I worry that the actors will forget their lines and my overactive empathy gland would explode...did you know that I was worried when (I think it was) Shannon Doherty was replaced by an actress who had been on Saved by the Bell on some show I had never seen I actually felt worried that the new actress would mess up her lines, a concern which seems empathetic until we remember that we are talking about the new episode of a television show which had already been filmed, using multiple takes. I knew that but was still worried. That's not empathy, that's just crazy. So I guess I'm handing the idea off to someone who can make it theatrical and I'll wait for the novelization of the movie.

I spend an ordinate amount of time (yes, I said it and I stand by it) engaging with the masses and multitudes in conversation of one form or another via web-based platforms. I use the written word on message boards, interest groups and forums (fora?) and talk about a variety of life issues as I balance all the threads, subthreads, side conversations, direct messages, and real life. I often center around discussions of Israel and of religion (to some degree of sectarian identification or another). The ebb and flow of the conversation can be surprising and both predictable and not. Knowing the players, following an etiquette, choosing the identity to establish etc are interwoven into the fabric of messages. I did research on this as it applied specifically to chatrooms and their impact on the creation of a new dialect of English. Let me know if that seems interesting to you and maybe I'll look in the old files (I wrote it over 20 years ago) and send it over.

Anyway, I can imagine an empty stage and it is the physical space of forum incarnate. Different people walk on and off to say their messages, following the (il)logic of forum conversations. While 2 people are having a back-and-forth, even a heated one, a person may walk through and say something either irrelevant or only tangential and then try to insert himself...this then breaks into other simultaneous arguments or side conversations with actors using the physical space and the entrance/exit from the stage into a choreography as important as the content. Then a new person comes in and everything bubbles up again. The pacing speeds to the frenetic extreme and some posts are a single word or just an image and other times the battle grounds lay, fallow and simply waiting.

Having been in these threaded conversations for more years than I can count on the middle finger of my left hand, I can promise the right aspiring writer that this has the potential to be an incredible crystallization of an under-represented cyberculture - "Keyboard Warriors" .

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