1991
When I was at school, I spent a lot of my time in the school library. This is something, I'm sure, I share with many other noders. Much of this time, I spent sitting at the table nearest the Encyclopædia Britannica. I'd have some topic in my mind — something I'd heard of but didn't really understand — and I'd look it up. The addictiveness of the encyclopedia was devious, however; it always gave you not-quite-enough information to satisfy whilst throwing out new terms and ideas which needed looking-up. An hour later I'd still be there with five different volumes open at different pages and many of my fingers holding different places as I spun outwards across the web of interconnected information.
1996
University libraries are, of course, much bigger than school libraries. I realised I could find books to a much greater depth on pretty much any subject I wanted. I would often end up there after dragging my hung-over self towards the campus too late to get to any of my lectures. It only took me a couple of months to build up big enough late fines on my library card to prevent me from actually leaving the library with a book, so I would often still be there when they came to kick me out — open books on science, religion, programming and history surrounding me — leaving me to go back to halls and prepare for another hang-over the next morning.
2006
Firefox opens and the front page of E2 is displayed. One or two New Writeups catch my attention and they are given new tabs. These nodes are read, and more tabs are opened. Google searches are given tabs, Wikipedia is ventured into, weblogs, newspaper sites and mailing list archives are all consulted. Firefox's tab pane overfills and I begin to process it all — mentally processing each page before closing it down, moving from left to right. Finally only two tabs remain — but these turn out to be fertile ground for new areas of interest, and so the cycle begins again.
Suddenly it is 3.00AM.
Sometimes I wonder what we're trying to do at E2. These days, when I'm looking for information I tend to use Wikipedia a lot more than I used to. But then it occurs to me that we're not really trying to create anything. We just all have this same hunger. We want to read; fact, fiction, prose, poetry, statistics, everything. We eat our way through it like a maggot works through an apple. And we can get it all in one place. Then, we build on it ourselves. Thousands of hours work from thousands of others like ourselves, we pile our own work on top and then attempt to bury it deep within the squirming, interlinked mass of writing. And then we watch others suck it in. Feeding on our words just as we did on theirs like a whole symbiotic mass; all of us each others' parasites.
Try to define E2 as something, if you like. A community, a place for writing, for reading, for making friends, an experiment, a digital ode to research and work. But any attempt to explain E2 is doomed to be bollocks. E2 just is. It's here because this is what we do.
Or maybe I'm just far to tired and I need to go to sleep....