ronknights opened this issue on Jan 31, 2002 ยท 160 posts
ockham posted Thu, 31 January 2002 at 7:52 AM
Well, I can't match the emotional resonance and depth of those stories! When I first went online with Compuserve, about 13 years ago, I mainly frequented political and religious forums. I quickly realized that most of what I posted was sort of off-message and unwanted by the inevitable "teams" that develop on such forums. No matter the subject, from computers to religion to sex, there are always two teams in a forum; if you agree with team A, you'll get cheers from A and friendly jeers from B. (And vice versa) But if you question the basic assumptions of both teams, as I always found myself doing, you'll be ignored or strongly dismissed. So I started calling myself Ockham: not the most common spelling of the name, but more likely to be unique online.