When I explain the role that the Internet played in my life, I usually say, “The first online community that I ever joined was a Lord of the Rings messageboard, even though I’ve never liked Tolkien in my life.” Contradictory, right? Well, let me explain.
In middle school, everybody I knew suddenly became absolutely obsessed with the first Lord of the Rings movie. For months on end, it was the only topic of conversation, and I do mean the only topic. As annoying as this would have been under normal circumstances, it was worse for me because I couldn’t participate in any of the discussions: the movie wasn’t subtitled, so I couldn’t go watch it. I’ve described in a previous entry how miserable I was throughout this whole affair.
Since I couldn’t watch the movie, I tried another angle: reading the series. I figured, “I love to read. All my friends are talking about the movie based upon this series. I’ll read it so that I can at least know who all these elves or dwarves or whatever are.” Well, as it turned out, those books were just too damn boring! Obviously, the only logical conclusion was that the movie must have been a million times more exciting than the books.
Thanks to this failed effort, I continued to feel like an outsider. But one day, everything changed when one of my best friends joined a Lord of the Rings messageboard and invited everybody else to do so as well.
[Visual description: A messageboard with a blue background. Categories: General, The Books, The Movies. Red folders are depicted next to the subcategories.]
It was a tiny messageboard with approximately 75 registered users total. The whole atmosphere was super laid back – people liked Lord of the Rings, but they weren’t rabid fans by any means. Most people were there to chill and hang out. We talked about random things, like how cool the marquee HTML tag was or how hot Orlando Bloom was as Legolas. In short, it was the perfect place for a kid who wanted some way, no matter how superficial, to take part in this topic of discussion that had dominated every aspect of his friends’ lives for the past few months. But, as it turned out, it was more than that.
I continued to frequent this messageboard and other Tolkien-centric messageboards even after my friends finally tired of Lord of the Rings and moved onto other things. Why? One very simple reason: At long last, I had finally found a place where communication wasn’t a total chore!
Here’s the thing about a lot of Hearing people, especially when you’re going to a middle school full of them. They have a tendency to congregate in large groups where it becomes difficult to lipread anybody – worse, they won’t repeat anything because “it’s not important.”
On the Internet, that never was the case: someone typed something and I instantly understood what they said. Conversely, people didn’t have to ask me to repeat myself a million times because it didn’t matter how well I spoke: I typed something, they understood it.
And that is that the story of how I ended up making my first online friends on a Lord of the Rings messageboard even though I’ve never liked Lord of the Rings.
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