Communication breakdown
The scooter scene has always been subject to many opinions, the art of sharing them changing constantly, but is communication now too fragmented and diluted?
The scooter scene is remarkably diverse, covering a wide spectrum of topics and there’s never a time when it’s not being talked about. It can be anything from agreement to argument, quite often leading to controversial exchanges in the process. It may be just something that I have noticed… but is the art of communication within the scene slowly dying out? It’s not like there is a shortage of topics to talk about, far from it – whether it’s rallies and events, tuning, custom styles, music... it’s all there. Perhaps the problem is there are too many places in which to discuss matters these days and that has led to it being fragmented far too much.
Before the advent of the internet the only way to communicate and find out what was happening was physically done by simply talking to each other, either between fellow club mates or at rallies. There were magazines that bridged the distance gap, but they mainly served as the platform from which to share material. That was the way the format continued right the way through into the 1990s. Then all hail Bill Gates and his associated band of merry IT scientists who not only rolled out PC home ownership to the masses, but also a system that could connect the whole world, the internet.
I can remember being shown how the system worked by a computer geek friend and watching the image of a Lambretta from the other side of the world being shared. It may have taken 30-odd minutes to download, but it was a start – one that changed things forever. So what has all this got to do with the scooter scene? Well, by the year 2000 the majority of us had access to the internet, which sparked off the explosion of the ‘dot com website’. Basic they may have been, but it sparked a dramatic change in how we bought items for our scooters via the later introduction of the webstore. The beauty of it all was the more advanced websites could constantly update on a regular basis, making the scene come into your living room. The 56k modem may have been painfully slow but who cared as we all started talking to each other across the world wide web.
The real revolution started with the forum and though they may have been simple to start with, they became more user-friendly. They sprang up all over the place and importantly got scooteristst ttalkinglki tto eachh other on a daily basis. It was a revelation not only being able to tell others what you were doing but also post pictures in the process. Any subject within the scene was up for discussion and as the forum platforms became more advanced, specific areas to discuss different topics started to appear. Like anything in life, there is always a downside and when things got controversial the rows could be explosive and last for days. Thankfully, once moderators got to grips with it all, this problem became less prominent and allowed the topics to flow far easier.
The forums became a wealth of knowledge, with owners able to access information in an instant and it seemed this was the way things would stay. Then, one sad day, we were all introduced to Facebook, the biggest social media platform ever invented. What more could you want, groups for specific genres of scootering covering every angle of the scene thinkable? Hundreds of photographs shared with the world in an instant as the groups became bigger than anyone imagined. People getting their daily fix of the latest scooter or on a weekend, almost live coverage of a rally. This really was the scooter scene at your desk or soon enough phone, you could be anywhere in the world and look at what was happening.
Great though it may have seemed it had a few underlying problems, one being its ability to slowly kill off the art of conversation. Slowly the whole concept hhas becomeb image-idrivendi andd nott necessarily ones of your own scooter etc., often ones of those from the past. We have almost become dependent on the nostalgic trip a grainy old Polaroid from the 1970s now offers. Not just the scooters themselves but the car behind it in the image, crap then and rusted to oblivion by now, but allowing us to revisit a memory from our youth. The discussion is now taken over by a one-line comment with no relevance, some even fuelled by alcohol, or ignorance.
It’s not like that all the time and there is still some discussion on subjects, quite often very heated. It’s becoming less and less though and often lost in the daily churning of recycled pictures we have seen repeatedly, scrolling down the screen like toilet roll. With new groups springing up every week, it is beyond saturation point. The shared contents of someone’s old photo albums, dare I say, is getting a bit long in the tooth now.
A casualty of social media was forums, many of them now defunct. Thankfully, those that are left have something social media doesn’t… a huge database of information that is available to resource at any time, and that is why, even today, Scooterotica Forum still has better traffic than even the most popular ‘digital scooter magazines’. Perhaps forums have become like libraries but at least they still serve a purpose, and it would be nice to see some regular discussion again that social media doesn’t quite achieve!