Big question - how did the internet change skiing culture?

Member ID 7036...

Sorry, I had to.

Although I am not old enough to remember the days you are referring to (I am 28) I will say discovering the community here with Newschoolers and certainly changed my view of skiing. I had always been interested in park but did not know anyone who skied park and with no form of instruction had always been nervous to try it. To top it off making random friends on the mountain had never been my strong suit to begin with either. Being here and being able to learn the tricks and the slang from the safety of my home and all that shit made interacting with the guys at the mountain much easier. I no longer came off as a total gaper and I got to ease into the community. A little guidance from a few new friends and I was off and running, a few years later I started writing a blog on NS that got me in with the NS crew and it changed my winters forever. I am saddened that my real life responsibilities keep me away from my friends here more than I would like, but I still have a blast at the meetups.

I think the biggest take-away from the Internets effect on ski culture is that it gave us the ability to talk and share what we love with people who love it also constantly. I am not constantly bombarded with skiing culture between emails from NS, posts on Facebook from NS, Level 1 and Line, and Snaps of the NS crew doing stupid shit near 24/7. If I want I can hop on here and talk about some ridiculous shit I just saw float across my feed. I think the most important thing the internet has done for us is unify our community in one place where we can talk and share, which people are way more likely to do online than in person.

why people over 28? fucking age-ist cis gendered white male shitlord.


JK, Im 20 so can I throw my hat into the ring on this one?

I feel like people from this current generation (including myself) have become sorta jaded when it comes to the amount of ridiculous skiing and ridiculous ski content that is churned out on a regular basis. Not that people aren't giving credit where its due, but people seem to really enjoy criticizing and nit-picking each others skiing and love to tell people which tricks are cool and which aren't and that's just fucking stupid, I think. I was a little pipsqueak shithead in the early days of newschool skiing so I really have no idea what it was like or the feeling of waiting for each years lineup of movies to drop to see some insane stuff, but there is a good amount of threads/posts and just commentary in general of people just not being completely satisfied with some next-level riding. Im totally forgetting what it was but whatever that movie/edit review series that was getting shit on all over (for good reasons) on here makes my fucking blood boil. What the fuck are we turning into now, Fucking siskel and ebert? go fuck yourselves. You're allowed to have your opinions but if you think you "know" how some riders can improve or how some production companies/crews can improve their movies, get off your asses and do it yourself to show them.

I grew up skiing in North East Ohio in the 90s (BMBW if you must know). They had one park, if you could call it that, for snowboarders only. Of course, I poached it. And of course, because I had no idea what I was doing and there was no place to learn, did all the things that made snowboarders hate skiers in the park. The first resort-sanctioned "jump" I remember hitting was a 3-foot tall cheese wedge to flat surrounded by a forest of bamboo poles so the local joeys wouldn't accidentally go off it. It was awesome.

Culture was purely local. If big things were happening in freeski culture, we were oblivious. I didn't know freeskiing magazines existed because the local book stores only carried Ski, Skiing, etc. I vividly remember the first time I saw Powder Magazine when it was mis-delivered to my mailbox in college. On the cover was a line in Haines. It was life-changing. Up to that point, my entire perception of skiing was resort based. It never occurred to me that there was a backcountry (because in Ohio, everything was man-made snow, how could you ski trees?). And it certainly never occurred to me to setup a handrail or get a ride in a heli to a remote peak in AK. We mimicked what we saw around us. We didn't have any skiing role-models outside of what we saw at the Olympics. Johnny Moseley was the shit.

I moved to Colorado in 2001, at the very beginning of online communities. Colorado already had a well developed ski and snowboard culture. My first exposure to ski movies was when I rented a VHS tape at a local rental store. I then rented every DVD ski movie through the mail from Netflix. Before YouTube you could subscribe to a video magazine and have a DVD sent to your house every month or two. Everyone was reading magazines. Skiers read TW Snowboarding in addition to Freeze and Freeskier because there wasn't enough material out there.

Magazine websites would update monthly or weekly. Months would go by without anything new on a site until Snowboard Magazine decided they would turn over the content on their front page every day in 2006. They didn't always succeed, but it changed online snowsports media.

The magazines and filmmakers were the tastemakers. It was a hierarchical culture where the media shaped the sport, decided who the best skiers, photographers and filmmakers were and what was cool. Getting noticed without connections was impossible, even in Colorado. Meeting a pro in person was unheard of, let alone interacting with them online. You only saw them in magazines, videos or on TV, which meant they seemed larger than life. This is embarrassing, but I still remember being star struck the first time I met Steele Spence.

Things happened much slower. By the time you read about it in a mag or saw it in a video it was more than six months old. Publishing an edit online meant mastering the dark arts of the internet. If you had a popular video, you'd have to set up your own server or declare bankruptcy from bandwidth costs. Popular videos were going offline all the time as a result. Online media was much more limited because it was so hard and expensive to produce. I think that's why content was longer and more polished. There was significantly more cost in time and money per unit, so you packed your best stuff into one edit or one DVD since it was too hard to push out content on a daily or even monthly basis.

AdrenalineGarageI grew up skiing in North East Ohio in the 90s (BMBW if you must know). They had one park, if you could call it that, for snowboarders only. Of course, I poached it. And of course, because I had no idea what I was doing and there was no place to learn, did all the things that made snowboarders hate skiers in the park. The first resort-sanctioned "jump" I remember hitting was a 3-foot tall cheese wedge to flat surrounded by a forest of bamboo poles so the local joeys wouldn't accidentally go off it. It was awesome.

Culture was purely local. If big things were happening in freeski culture, we were oblivious. I didn't know freeskiing magazines existed because the local book stores only carried Ski, Skiing, etc. I vividly remember the first time I saw Powder Magazine when it was mis-delivered to my mailbox in college. On the cover was a line in Haines. It was life-changing. Up to that point, my entire perception of skiing was resort based. It never occurred to me that there was a backcountry (because in Ohio, everything was man-made snow, how could you ski trees?). And it certainly never occurred to me to setup a handrail or get a ride in a heli to a remote peak in AK. We mimicked what we saw around us. We didn't have any skiing role-models outside of what we saw at the Olympics. Johnny Moseley was the shit.

I moved to Colorado in 2001, at the very beginning of online communities. Colorado already had a well developed ski and snowboard culture. My first exposure to ski movies was when I rented a VHS tape at a local rental store. I then rented every DVD ski movie through the mail from Netflix. Before YouTube you could subscribe to a video magazine and have a DVD sent to your house every month or two. Everyone was reading magazines. Skiers read TW Snowboarding in addition to Freeze and Freeskier because there wasn't enough material out there.

Magazine websites would update monthly or weekly. Months would go by without anything new on a site until Snowboard Magazine decided they would turn over the content on their front page every day in 2006. They didn't always succeed, but it changed online snowsports media.

The magazines and filmmakers were the tastemakers. It was a hierarchical culture where the media shaped the sport, decided who the best skiers, photographers and filmmakers were and what was cool. Getting noticed without connections was impossible, even in Colorado. Meeting a pro in person was unheard of, let alone interacting with them online. You only saw them in magazines, videos or on TV, which meant they seemed larger than life. This is embarrassing, but I still remember being star struck the first time I met Steele Spence.

Things happened much slower. By the time you read about it in a mag or saw it in a video it was more than six months old. Publishing an edit online meant mastering the dark arts of the internet. If you had a popular video, you'd have to set up your own server or declare bankruptcy from bandwidth costs. Popular videos were going offline all the time as a result. Online media was much more limited because it was so hard and expensive to produce. I think that's why content was longer and more polished. There was significantly more cost in time and money per unit, so you packed your best stuff into one edit or one DVD since it was too hard to push out content on a daily or even monthly basis.

How long were you around bmbw? Is it true they once had a half pipe?

RparrHow long were you around bmbw? Is it true they once had a half pipe?

I learned to ski there when I was 4 in the 80s and kept skiing there until I moved away for college.

It's true that they had two vertical wavy walls of ice about 6ft. tall. Calling them a halfpipe is a little generous.

The internet changed skiing for the better imo

Social media fucked it up completely tho