A Place in History

Posted on July 8, 2002 in Blogging

I’ve long called the Net the site of the most significant folk revolution of modern times. Web logs, I have concluded, are the cutting edge of that democratic change and I’ve played my part in its development. The masses who create them rebel against these things:

• Editors who insist that you submit material in their idea of perfect form, which means slick packaging, absence of personal sentiment, and writing that is dumbed down so that the readers cannot possibly use the stuff you write as a springboard for anything except gossip;
  
• The loss of the art of letter writing;
  
• IRC channels and chat rooms that drip with tuna-flavored sex and scarlet political invective;
  
• Academic organizations that believe only the duly credentialed deserve a voice;
  
• abUSEnet news groups who lack curiosity and clutter the screen with endless responses to responses, leading you to the same dead ends.

I’ve been through all of these phenomena and a few more besides, but I think that it was my experiences on the abUSENet and mailing lists that truly drove me to the variety of online writing in which I now indulge. I hate cliques and I hate being included in them. I do not write on behalf of any organization simply because I dislike being told what is correct and on topic. (Though if any editors feel that something here is worth reprinting, they are welcome to contact me)

In 1992, I went to Yugoslavia to work for three months at a peace center. Back then, I styled myself as a “journalist”, mostly to lend some credibility to the peculiar type of freelancing I did. Today, I find the label inappropriate. I’m not altogether sure if I invited myself or they invited me. But I went. I avoided the usual places you could find journalists like the government press rooms and the bar at the Hotel International in Zagreb. I sought out my own witnesses to what was happening, sometimes just people on the streets who happened to speak English, and I wrote about them. I am sure that the Croatian government may have sent a few people my way. But I think I could make out who they were and judge their remarks accordingly. I think it made for a different story than what the media wanted and a truer one because I sought to write outside their box (but maybe too much into my own. I believe I have grown out of that need.) I posted my letters on abUSEnet news groups and did not respond to comments, a practice I mostly follow today.

Any history of weblogs, I think, must include my MIRacles and the more extensive, contemporary work of my peer Wam Kat. The origins of the current phenomena run through us. It goes farther back, too, to Gulf War diaries by Israelies who wrote of the nights when the SCUDs rained down on their cities and to descriptions written by myself and others about peace marches happening in the United States at the time. Before that, even, people sometimes posted journal excerpts online amid the hectoring rants of news groups. Those postings and the web pages that followed were a response to endless debates within that chaotic context, a place where people were neither committed to telling the truth or to saying something beautiful — just to flame wars and mass propaganda. The brave ones sought to share their real thinking. And when they could no longer go drifting along with the hot, fast, shallow flow of the river of InterNet damnation, they got out. They jumped onto the web.

Some people were angered by this move. To this day, they ban announcements from web sites from their groups, from their IRC channels, from their mailing lists. What angers them most of all is that by taking these things out of their circles, the blogger does not help sustain the masses. Some fools try to argue with web pages, often without reading them, in these groups. Others speak loudly for the ban. I have, for my part, never forbidden topical mention of web sites on any site or channel that I run. The channel ops and mailing list owners who overrestrict things merely demonstrate their fear that their voice is not compelling enough.

To set the record straight, I do not claim parentage of web logs. I did not start this until late in the game, after I had spent years writing topical sites about cemeteries, California history, and Alcatraz. But I do claim my part in creating and upholding the new value of the InterNet, that of freedom, the freedom to speak without editors or moderators. My web log is a kind of letter to the world, whose whole course is determined by me, the writer, alone. I urge and support the efforts of others to do the same.

On my tombstone, I have asked my wife to inscribe just two words as my epitaph: INTERNET PIONEER. And maybe: (Since 1988).