It was just the other day that I found myself at the worst Christmas party in Toronto. (You don't have to tell me; I know there's stiff competition for the title.) It was three inescapable hours of saying nothing to everybody in a large, empty room. When other guests opened their mouths to speak, all I could hear was the sound of a perfectly good evening asphyxiating.
It was all too much. The Web has been a better friend to me lately, so at length I scuttled off to the corner, pulled out my phone and announced my plight to the Internet. Taking an educated guess that nobody else in the room would be looking at the Web at that precise moment, I posted a note on Twitter, the thoroughly entertaining blogging service that is in the air this season.
“At the worst Christmas party in Toronto,” I pecked out. Apparently, the sentiment struck a chord, because soon others on the service were sending little disembodied commiserations from wherever they happened to be.
There will, however, be no such luxury come Monday. A curious thing will be happening in Toronto: a Christmas party where people won't just be Twittering, but where their tweets will be projected onto a large video screen. The DJs will be taking requests via Twitter. In fact, a goodly number of people there will be there because they heard about the party on Twitter. And there will be about 600 of them.
'Tis the season to be geeky, fa la la la la. Across Canada, the Web-geek party isn't just establishing itself as a genre, it's starting to become a seasonal rite. Halifax techies will be celebrating “Geekmas” on Wednesday. And the Toronto party was inspired by a similar event in Montreal.
Suddenly, the geek party is everywhere. They can be distinguished from the regular variety by a few telltale signs. The most evident of these is the ostentatious flaunting of high-tech trinkets that may or may not actually make the party any better. Usually, this involves projectors and some hopeful attempt at interactivity, like displaying live feeds of text messages or online photos.
This can work well, or not. Jesse Brown, the CBC's resident online-culture expert, has seen a few geek parties in his time. Several years back, he says, a fiddly attempt to create an online collaborative cartoon in front of a room of partygoers turned into “a complete debacle.”
But he's had better luck lately with Bitstrips.com, a venture he has a part of that lets people create winsome comic-book likenesses of themselves and their friends. Brown has seen parties where someone with a laptop was busy using Bitstrips to project cartoon likenesses of guests. And when the site held an awards ceremony for its comic-making users at a trendy Toronto bar, they pushed cartooned versions of the winners onto the Internet as a form of simulcast.
But what really sets a geek party apart is that they're often full of people who know each other very, very well, but have never actually met. The social-media world, which encompasses bloggers, Twitterers, the members of sundry forums and other online communities, tends to attract people who work in small start-ups or from home offices – and, as a result, do a lot of bantering online. And that can lead to a curious dynamic when they emerge into the offline world.
“It really is fascinating,” says Rob Hyndman, a lawyer and blogger who helped to put the Toronto event together. “It's like being in a big room full of people you know well but haven't seen in a really long time.”
(In the case of Brown's parties, it was even stranger to meet people in real life whom he has known only as distorted, yet recognizable cartoon avatars of themselves. “It was like meeting a Homer Simpson,” he says.)
The Toronto party is becoming a social-media case study in its own right. It actually originated with Austin Hill, an Internet entrepreneur based in Montreal. Hill had been surveying the small start-ups he was working with, asking about their Christmas plans. In search of a better party, they decided to pool their resources into a charity event with all the geek trimmings, benefiting the Montreal Children's Hospital.
“For us, this is a celebration of what the Montreal tech community has become,” Hill told me. Of course, the organizing happened online, in public, on Twitter, and the idea spread. “The Toronto guys saw our tweets and replicated it overnight.”
Hyndman saw Hill's messages, and mooted the idea of hosting a Toronto version. Within hours, some of the 600-odd people who follow his Twitter writings had stepped up to the plate. Since then, an organizing committee has been struck (half of whom Hyndman had never met in person), Twitter-reading DJs hopped on board and secured the Mod Club, a storied venue, and sponsors were solicited. In the space of two weeks, the event went from non-existent to one of the year's 10 biggest fundraisers for Toronto's Daily Bread food bank, bringing in more than $15,000.
Tickets are almost sold out. For those who can't make it, a live video feed of the event will be streamed online.
Reader, I can hear your head exploding from here. Surely, you say, the worst Christmas party in Canada must be the one you watch in a little grainy box, hunched over your computer screen with a cup of consolation nog. But that would underestimate the Web-geek mentality.
“You live a good part of your life on the Web if you're part of this community,” says Hyndman, with a laugh. “You have to understand what people in this community are like.”
