The Voluntary Virus

Fire and Rain - James Taylor (mp3)
Ghosts - Fanfarlo (mp3)

Most of the time, when we talk of the Internet and things “going viral,” there’s this sense that those of us who get sucked in are somehow victims. As if we unwittingly or unknowingly caught this contagion that’s out there in the open, like germs floating through our shared cyber-oxygen.

This week, however, I have witnessed the singularly biggest voluntary virus of my techno-life. A fellow high school alum, two years my junior, started a Facebook Group (newly redesigned to show up in your stream) with the title of “If you went to (our school), you remember when...”

He started this group last Saturday night. July 30. As of Monday morning, it had over 300 members. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was quickly approaching 500.

This isn’t a public page. It has a moderator. The only way you can get in is to be invited or to request, and he’s only accepting members who attended one of two local high schools.

This one group is the single most explosive and dangerous and amazing and successful social media outreach campaign our school could never have ever devised on its own because we are, as an entity, afraid that exactly what is happening might happen.

Which is to say, at least ⅔ of the memories and stories and commentaries which populate the group are grossly unflattering. They talk of drinking, smoking, partying. They talk of bad teachers, awful teachers, incompetent teachers. They brag of illegal activities, immoral activities, merely wild and crazy activities.

And we’re not talking a few pages. On Monday, I expanded all comments and opened all posts so that every comment to every entry from the start of the group onward was exposed, and it became an 86-page PDF. By Tuesday night, it was closer to 130 pages. Members are adding comments and “starter memories” to the site at the rate of 10-20 each hour.

A vast majority of the group’s members are graduates between 1986-1996, although as the group grows, so does the age range, little bit by little bit.

It’s become this huge, instant, online, multigenerational campfire.

We’re all sitting around it telling stories and naming names from our memories, and everyone else is reacting to them. It’s bigger than the biggest church camp campfire I’ve ever seen. Firewood keeps piling on, and the flames keep generating plenty of heat and sparks, and the marshallows keep roasting, and the cheesy Kumbaya songs keep playing (sometimes in rounds!).

Best of all, there’s no counselors. It’s just campers, free to say whatever the f*#k they feel like without giving a flip what the stupid adults say.
Unfortunately, I’m one of the adults. I’m like that camper who had to grow up and become one of the camp’s leaders, and I’m squatting behind one of the trees on the fringes of the crowd, hiding from the heat and the light, but enjoying the ecstatic communal nature of the event as best I can from my secret vantage point.

If I reveal myself, I’m required to represent the school rather than my former student self and my former student memories.

The longest single thread, by far, had reached 110 comments by Tuesday night and focused on the surreal suicide of a student some 20 years ago, an event that was simultaneously very public yet also shrouded in mystery and rumor and myth. I’ve read every comment, many of them twice. Some are grossly inaccurate. Others come in and try to correct, to offer their versions, their memories. The collective, amazingly, gets close to the truth of things once you read them all together, even if some of them prove to be either naive or insensitive or just excruciatingly idiotic.

Several guys confessed that they got very emotional just reading through the comments, as did I. I knew the boy, and I remembered hearing about it as a freshman in college, and I remember reading the detailed confidential investigative reports when I started my job. I wanted so badly to tell some guys they were full of crap and others that they had most of it right, but instead, I had to just read, and take quick, gaspy breaths, and stay hidden behind that tree.

I don’t know how long this campfire will last, when the kindling will disappear, when the campers will yawn and dissipate, making their ways back to their cabin beds before their parents come to pick them up in the morning.

I only know that, no matter how long it goes, it’s been the single most amazing cyber-campfire I’ve ever seen ignite on my computer screen, and it’s been absolutely, perfectly imperfectly beautiful.

Scrabble, by any other name....

My Morning Jacket--"Wordless Chorus" (mp3)

STUDENT: hey mr b i just emailed you about the test, can i take it now

STUDENT: ill just take it and you decide what you want but it cxloses soon right

ME: Take it now where did you go I marked you absent

STUDENT: i sat in the library and studied for it...just took it matching pumbled mee

STUDENT: true and false i did alright tuff test


Bear with me. I will establish the relevance of the above conversation.

Like most Americans, I have a certain amount of disdain for any social trend that I am not a part of. Seen from the outside or from the distance of years, almost any fad looks stupid. Like culottes for women. But right now, I am absolutely in the thick of the "Words With Friends" craze that is sweeping through the ranks of anyone who has an Iphone or another way to play the game.

In case you don't know, it's Scrabble under another name. The difference is that instead of a family of four sitting on the living room rug with a bowl of popcorn in front of the fire, parents beaming at the words their children come up with but still making a point of beating them soundly, you play the game online, against an opponent from another phone, someone you know or don't. But the longer you play, the more you settle on people you know because those whom you've played pass your "Words With Friends" screen name around like a cheap whore. Especially if you're an English teacher. And, all of a sudden, you've got games lined up like jets waiting to take off at La Guardia.

What better bragging rights than beating your English teacher at a game of Scrabble-ish? Right?

The game is quite fun, more fun than Scrabble. It has a different kind of pacing, in some ways more like chess, in some ways, more like cards. Like chess, "Words With Friends" allows you to take your own sweet time. You can ponder a move as long as you want. You can look at the board, contemplate, shut it down, come back to it another time. Or another day. If it does have a "timer" at all, it's something like 5 days. I've never reached that.

Like poker, it is not about having the best "cards" aka letters, it is about knowing how and when to play them. It's not about winning one game. Sometimes you just don't get the letters and the opportunities on the board to rack up the points you need, and you fold. At first, you're desperate to win every game against every opponent, but then you get philosophical about it, then you appreciate the beauty of moves, yours or theirs, and you know that if you don't win, a new game can start immediately.

Today I played P-O-R-N for 55 points, even though the total letter value for those 4 letters is only 7 points. But get that P on a "Triple Letter Score" tile and that N on a "Triple Word Score" tile and cozy those letters up against letters already on the board to make smaller sidewords and all of a sudden, they start adding up. The other day, I played J-A-N-E for 102 points, using the same strategy.

And, believe it or not, "Words With Friends" is the latest social network. I am playing with former students, colleagues, a godson, students from my class, current students I've never met, my daughters. So far. But that doesn't make it a social network, you say. That just makes it a game. The funny thing is when your phone makes that special noise telling you that one or more of your opponents have made a move, it's almost like they're calling you, almost like you have a connection. I am in touch with people that I was not in touch with.

But there's more to it than that. The conversation you see at the top of this post, which happened last night, is a first for me, the crossing of a barrier. There is a place in each game of "Words With Friends" where you can leave messages, exchange taunts, whatever. But last night, as you can see, that message board became a way for a student to communicate with his teacher. It's weird, I know, but, more and more, it's probably going to be the way with everything. It's smart, too, since I happen to be beating that student by about 150 points and he may be thinking that if he contacts me within the game, I'll take pity on him.

I know I'll tire of "Words With Friends," maybe even soon. It's a fad, like most things related to the Internet. Maybe by the time you get into the game, I'll look at your opening move with the jaded condescension of a chess master. But for now, it's healthy competition, it's a way for teenagers and adults to connect, and it's a lot of fun to take that phone out before I go to bed and to get all of my games up to date. But, if I forget to turn the phone off, it will make that special noise about 2:45AM or 5:37AM or when I know a student is in someone else's class. By the way, that person in the stall next to you fiddling with his or her phone is probably playing me.