In Memoriam Google Groups, 2024

. 

Google Groups is no more – at least in its essential function of hosting Usenet newsgroups. I discovered this very recently when I tried to post there. Would-be users clicking on https://groups.google.com  now, as of 22 February 2024, find themselves confronted by a stark message reading: ‘Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions’. The message adds that ‘historical content remains viewable’: the archive of existing posts remains (and is accessible via Google search), but the facility is now frozen in time. A supplementary window explains that this has happened thanks to the decline in recent years of ‘legitimate Usenet activity’ because users have moved to ‘more modern technologies and formats’ such as social media and web-based forums. 

It may be that in the era of social media there are few to mourn. I am writing this in another medium, the blog, which did not exist when I first joined Usenet and itself may not last forever. At all events, for me at least Usenet and its groups were very important in my discovery of the internet. The Usenet network was founded in 1980 and was taken over by the Google empire as Google Groups in 2001. My own first encounter with Usenet dates from late 1996. After taking the then avant-garde step of having an internet connection, I asked myself what on earth I was going to do with this innovation in my life. It happens I am a devotee of folk/ethnic/traditional musics and at the time subscribed to the (now alas defunct) print magazine specialising in such genres, Folk Roots (later Froots). Hidden away in my latest copy was a Uniform Resource Locator (url to the initiated) for the magazine’s newly created website, and on this I clicked. It had links to various other online addresses, and one of them was rec.music.dylan. I am also an acolyte of Bob Dylan, and I sped straight as an arrow to that newsgroup address. 

I was delighted to find that rec.music.dylan as it was then proved to be a forum for discussions, questions and exchange of information about Bob Dylan, with no hierarchy – anyone could post, and Usenet was free of charge. At the time the groups were text-only (no attachments), which arguably at that stage in the internet’s development helped concentrate minds and facilitated interaction. Through this group I was able to talk to recognised Dylan experts, including from the academic world, and was soon posting in the group. Those posts were part of a chain of communication which made possible the many articles, lectures and conference papers that I have produced since then on the bard from Minnesota.

The rec.music.dylan group had its heyday but over time was largely superseded by other media. It did carry on till the end (and I occasionally still posted there), but in its latter days was reduced to a small clique of hardcore aficionados, many using pseudonyms, and the discussions were of little interest. Nonetheless, at the major Dylan conference held in Tulsa in 2019 two different people whom I didn’t know congratulated me from the audience on my early Dylan posts, and I was really moved!

It wasn’t only Dylan, far from it. I posted in other groups too: if I had a book review to write, it went to rec.arts.books.reviews, and with luck feedback was not lacking. A post in soc.culture.portuguese led to fruitful contact and publications in Portugal. Soc.culture.indian allowed me to access debates on Indian Writing in English. I could multiply the examples: if I had a piece of writing to offer the world, there would almost certainly be a suitable Usenet group to host it.

I realise these reminiscences may seem anachronistic to some, but today in 2024 I remain enormously grateful to the old Usenet system, for the doors it opened to me in the heroic days of the early internet!