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Oct. 15th, 2003 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmWhen I talk about the time I've spent on the Internet, I often talk about how the early days seemed like life conducted with two tin cans and a string for communication. I mean, for heaven's sake I used the utterly defective bitnet to talk to people about Twin Peaks and read missives sent illegally out of China by dissidents. It was cool, it was the edge of the world, and it predated both the web and the journal and blog phenomena. This also predated spam and a lot of similar things, but that is a somewhat seperate story.
I often miss the tin can and a string aspect of the Internet, not in the sense of how clunky it was then, or how badly it still often works now, but the sense of missives from another world, whispered to you through walls of lives you couldn't possibly imagine. We were all so far away from each other, and now, I rarely consider the immense distances between myself and most of the people I communicate with here.
The phenomena of personal accounts on the web, restored a lot of that feeling for me. But here, I talk of early journals, where people coded them themselves and there was no LJ and no Diary.com and so forth. Of course, as more people decided to do this, as there was more demand to do this, these services did spring up, and the mundane details of other people's lives became just that -- mundane, and no longer the mystical whisperings of a life and being that seemed so totally alien.
Of course, those of who who do blog, do so for many reasons, and among those reasons is both the desire to recognize ourselves, and a desire to once again hear the whispered mysteries of things we have not yet even imagined. Mostly, though, we just chat, and forget the wonderment, and the power of what we do here.
In large part, this is because the world has changed. When I was talking in 1992 about how my art was about the common experiences everyone has and no one talks about, that meant something different than it does today. Because here, on the Internet we hear about all manner of heartbreak and injured flesh and dreams let go, justified and pushed away. We are all celebrities and we are all ordinary and there is perhaps very little statement left in what was mine when I was first writing and publishing and disocvering that I had something to say that not only mattered, but that intrigued people, or enraged them, or bored them, sometimes, even vehemently.
Occassionally though, people still tell stories here that... for lack of a better and more meaningful word shock us -- with their content, sincerity or foreigness. Some blogs, sometimes, still seem like those missives from a dark world, that I remember from all-nighters in an underground computer lab when I was seventeen. Today I stumbled upon something like that, that probably wouldn't be like that for particularly very many other people I know, and it leaves me in a curious and thoughtful state. One that, truthfully, I don't know how to write about, not precisely anyway, and so leaves me telling you this story, this assessment instead.
I often miss the tin can and a string aspect of the Internet, not in the sense of how clunky it was then, or how badly it still often works now, but the sense of missives from another world, whispered to you through walls of lives you couldn't possibly imagine. We were all so far away from each other, and now, I rarely consider the immense distances between myself and most of the people I communicate with here.
The phenomena of personal accounts on the web, restored a lot of that feeling for me. But here, I talk of early journals, where people coded them themselves and there was no LJ and no Diary.com and so forth. Of course, as more people decided to do this, as there was more demand to do this, these services did spring up, and the mundane details of other people's lives became just that -- mundane, and no longer the mystical whisperings of a life and being that seemed so totally alien.
Of course, those of who who do blog, do so for many reasons, and among those reasons is both the desire to recognize ourselves, and a desire to once again hear the whispered mysteries of things we have not yet even imagined. Mostly, though, we just chat, and forget the wonderment, and the power of what we do here.
In large part, this is because the world has changed. When I was talking in 1992 about how my art was about the common experiences everyone has and no one talks about, that meant something different than it does today. Because here, on the Internet we hear about all manner of heartbreak and injured flesh and dreams let go, justified and pushed away. We are all celebrities and we are all ordinary and there is perhaps very little statement left in what was mine when I was first writing and publishing and disocvering that I had something to say that not only mattered, but that intrigued people, or enraged them, or bored them, sometimes, even vehemently.
Occassionally though, people still tell stories here that... for lack of a better and more meaningful word shock us -- with their content, sincerity or foreigness. Some blogs, sometimes, still seem like those missives from a dark world, that I remember from all-nighters in an underground computer lab when I was seventeen. Today I stumbled upon something like that, that probably wouldn't be like that for particularly very many other people I know, and it leaves me in a curious and thoughtful state. One that, truthfully, I don't know how to write about, not precisely anyway, and so leaves me telling you this story, this assessment instead.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Well done...
Date: 2003-10-15 03:08 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I feel that the real possibilities for this haven't even begun to be explored. We are, I suspect, used to our little colony in Massachusetts and beyond us is an unexplored, and perhaps not uninhabited, continent.
discovering that I had something to say that not only mattered, but that intrigued people, or enraged them, or bored them, sometimes, even vehemently.
I feel like I reach that point almost every day - if my writing is going well. When I was booted, this year, from a position I had held for 9 years because of my blog it really brought it home to me. The power is still there.