+------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nilla . o O ( to moo or not to moo that is the question ) | +------------------------------------------------------------+This is a place for people to define MOO in their own way. The word MOO alone sounds silly, bovine. Which is OK since MOOs can be very silly places indeed. As Richard A. Lanham notes, "The computer world was born under the opposite star of game and play, and it's playful humor and game centered characteristic structures have endured" (The Electronic Word 78). MOOs can also be very serious. MOO is a data base which allows many people to connect through the Internet and interact with others through a
Pooh_Bear floats around the city limits, spamming us with silly Winnie-The-Pooh songs, witty puns, and scatological "verbs." Others join in or ignore Pooh altogether, holding their own threads of conversations. Kiwi giggles and wiggles her toes; Max and his rat Ick, dispense welcome herrings to all new guests; Toast, fresh out of the oven for a morning romp, crumbles, looking abashed; Fractal Muse bubbles around the room, while Pnambic pulls up a curb and sits. I sit, spellbound, connected to these people through miles of cable, our text carried in packets of bytes from continent to continent, server to server, through modems, to computers and back again, usually one character at a time. And I ponder .oO (what is this place? How do I talk?) Text scrolls by so quickly, I no longer have time to ponder if I want to join the conversation unfolding before me. I speak. "Hello. I'm new here," gets lost as Pooh "tut tuts," and Pnambic discerns yet another teenage male posing as a female. I try again. "Hi," I say. Crabapple_Guest raises a questioning eyebrow at me. I am rewarded this time with a welcome herring and learn to smile. I take a seat on the curb next to Pnambic. I can't quite do anything properly with the herring. I can't really talk well yet. So I think, pondering Kenneth Burke's parlor. How do I join in the conversation, when I don't yet know the dramatic principles at work, or perhaps, more importantly, at play? Yet, I can see that wordplay is the key to joining this discourse community. A digital conversational parlor. What fun KB could have had with these characters. I bet he would @addalias Liddell, wordman, and all those other cognomens he so gleefully took on.
