I noticed the generosity of the digital age even in my earliest days reading email lists, when I had a phone modem in our cinder block apartment on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, New Jersey. The modem's speed was 200 words per month or something similar, but still there were people in my field all across North America trading ideas every day. It was a bookish, trivia-loving crowd, admittedly, and I signed off one list in despair after most of the crew spent several days remembering every pop song that used spelling in its title or lyrics: "Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E became final today...." D-O-Z-E-N-S of these songs came to the minds of the assembly that week.

But on my main list there were these elders in the field who would show up day after day and share resources and answer questions and point people in the direction of previous studies or mention who someone should email or call to collaborate on a project. The generosity was mild-mannered, anything but pushy, and somewhere between tireless and infinite on the stamina scale. Younger folks would be working on a problem in the field, and this handful of elders would just simply help out. Every day.

When I started blogging, in 2003, I quickly ran into communities of bloggers who had the same ethic. Librarian-bloggers, for sure, and educators interested in making the web work for the good of students, for example. And occasionally I'd see the same thing in the land of various pastimes and hobbies, such as chess.

And the bedrock generosity of some folks online continues today. I ran across the YouTube chess feed of Mato Jelic, a teacher who has given the world over 800 short videos celebrating and unpacking the brilliance of the games of great masters. He shows the board, the moves of a particular game, and some alternate variations, all the while talking casually about chess tactics. Even with my over-the-hill chess brain I can feel neurons being nudged into fresh alignments when I watch one of Mato's videos. And you have not trouble spotting his love for the game.

People talk more about spam and the cruelty of the web, but this other strand is also everywhere, in abundance, and has been for years.