As some of you know, I'm still active on the BBSs (Yes, they still exist). So when Kevin Driscoll posted that he wrote a book on BBSs and how they inspired the current social media platforms, I was interested. Now that I've read it, it's time for a review.
The tl;dr:
It completely fails on the "prehistory of social media" part. There was no direct link from BBSs to something like Facebook other than "BBSs were places were people with common interests could post messages."
However, it is a well researched book on the evolution of BBSs from the first BBS in Chicago, through FidoNet and into the Internet. He didn't cover enough of the BBS history, but that's a bunch really big topics, each well deserved of its own book.
The down side is that the information that was researched was filtered through the Reality Distortion Field that the Woke seem to live in. So the view you get of what BBSs were, and still are, is very skewed.
OK. The longer explanation.
First off, the "woke-ness" of the book really left a bad taste in my mouth. Just little things like "The demographics or BBS users appears to have tracked with the broader adoption of personal computers in the United States..." - which is true. But then he had to tack this on: "skewing in favor of white men."
Later "While there was little variation by age and income, single white men were nearly twice as likely as other groups to report using bulletin boards."
Why the need to call this out? On the BBSs there's a very old saying "No one knows you are a dog." Meaning that race, sex, religion, etc. mean little. All people can see of you is your words in text. People judge you by those words - and nothing else.
In other places, he focused on BBSs that catered to the LBGT community, yet completely ignored the BBSs that were dedicated to ham radio, science fiction, and the other large interests of the geek community. If there was a "group" that BBSs identified with the most, it was the geeks, but he completely ignores that.
While not every section had such woke BS, it was scattered through out the book.
In the final chapter, he laments that some of his students came away with a "unexpected misunderstanding of early online culture." Well, duh! The book highlights the fringe groups and doesn't really talk much about the majority of interests on the BBSs. No wonder the students had a misunderstanding.
Most of the information presented was accurate, but woefully incomplete. ex: In one place, he posted a list of FidoNet message groups, but the list was heavily lopsided toward the groups that the ignorant woke people would like to see and it was not even close to representing reality. Reality was more heavy on the geek topics.
Unlike Kevin, I actually lived in the "The Modem World". I was
heavily into the BBSs from the 1980's until the Internet killed most of
the BBSs off. The world in this book is not the world that existed back
then, but rather a Leftie-skewed parody of the actual "Modem World".
Bottom line:
Not really worth it. You'd be better off viewing some YouTube videos on BBSs (Like Al's Geek Lab's Back to the BBS) or getting Jason Scott's BBS Documentary. They would be much more accurate than the Left-skewed "information" presented in this book.
As for me, the book is going into the Goodwill bag never to be seen again.
