Networking the Sherlock

At this point, it's pretty much clear that one overly-wealthy man-child decided to trash a social network site for petty reasons. As that network had a fairly robust Sherlockian community where even a one-topic blogger like myself could build over a thousand followers, seeing it getting bruised and battered has not been a happy thing. Many bolted for the doors. Many stayed put and hope to keep the connections they built there. And some even scattered themselves across multiple outlets, just to make sure they were covered.

So now the top of my favorites bar looks like this: 

Some of those are probably dead already, like some of the Discord channels that have been attempted over the years. And some day I'll get back to trying to figure out Tumblr after it defeated me a decade ago. 

So where do we go, what do we do to connect with fellow Sherlockians? Long gone are the days when The Baker Street Journal acted as the central hub for American Sherlockiana once per quarter. Things are moving a little more quickly now. (And quarterly is so long a period that I actually didn't notice I hadn't resubscribed and wasn't getting issues until late summer. There's just enough other Sherlockian channels that you can be distracted from such a thing.)

Podcasts are nice (he said as a podcaster) and I like a weekly update podcast. I wish we had a something like The Watsonian Weekly that was a little more "current news and events" which I had originally intended for that podcast, but as much as I hate to say this about ol' Johnny boy, he isn't really a good lynchpin for a Sherlock Holmes . . . oh, wait, he's Watson. He should be a great lynchpin. I'm an idiot.

The thing of it is, we just have so much available to us now. And while the internet connects us, it's also a vast landscape where we're spread out as well. We've now learned how easy it is to connect across oceans, but haven't quite figured out how to bridge cyberspace territories.  And where do we focus our attentions? 

Their are definitely levels of closeness with our friends: texting friends, Facebook friends, e-mailing friends, friends we see on certain Zooms, etc.  All our personal networks are varied levels of a variety of connection means. We use what tools suit us, and those tools are not always stable these days.

But as Watson said, "We can but try." (I always want to give Holmes credit for that, since he dressed it up with "Compound of the Busy Bee and Excelsior.") And on we go.