Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters - Hardcover

Rosenberg, Scott

 
9780307451361: Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307451364 ISBN 13: 9780307451361
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The co-founder of Salon.com explores the complex network of blogging and provides insights into the new medium with discussions on privacy, self-expression, authority, and community, and includes close-ups of blogging innovators, including Evan Williams of Blogger.com.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SCOTT ROSENBERG is an award-winning journalist who left the San Francisco Examiner in 1995 with a group of like-minded colleagues to found Salon.com, where he served first as technology editor, later as managing editor, and finally as vice president for new projects, leaving in 2007 to write Say Everything. For much of that time he wrote a blog covering the world of computers and the web, explaining complex issues in a lively voice for a non-technical readership. His coverage of the Microsoft trial, the Napster controversy, and the Internet bubble earned him a regular following. Rosenberg's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, the San Francisco Examiner, and other publications. His previous books include Dreaming In Code. Visit his website at www.wordyard.com.

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Chapter 1

PUTTING EVERYTHING OUT THERE

Justin Hall

In 1994, Justin Hall invented oversharing. Of course, we didn't have a name yet for the compulsion to tell the online world too much about yourself. Back then, Hall was just an eccentric nineteen-year-ld college student who recorded minutiae of his life on his personal website; no one knew that the self-revelation he found so addictive would one day become a temptation for millions.

Beginning at the dawn of the Web, Hall parked himself at the intersection of the Bay Area's remnant counterculture and Silicon Valley's accelerating economy and started writing down everything he saw. His website, at www.links.net, became a comprehensive personal gazette and archive, full of ephemeral details and intimate epiphanies, portraits of the Web's young builders and nude pictures of himself.

Hall, who is fair and thin and lanky--he looks a bit like one of Tolkien's elves--has the affable grin of someone who is fully at ease with strangers. If you took away his nonconformist streak, he could make a great salesman. You could even see him running for office and winning, in some alternate dimension where no one cared that he'd littered the public record with radical opinions and accounts of his illegal drug use, or that he frequently undermined his considerable charisma by intentionally irritating people. He often begins public speaking engagements by stepping to the podium, facing his audience, and silently beaming as the seconds tick by and the crowd begins to wonder what's going on. He seems perfectly comfortable making other people uncomfortable.

For more than a decade, Hall's site had presented an open window onto his life. "It's so much fun," he'd say, "putting everything out there." January 2005 seemed no different. He kicked off the new year with a blunt four-word post: "I really enjoy urinating." He told the story of a mustache-growing competition with a friend. He mentioned meeting "a smart, motivated gal" who wanted to collaborate on a story involving angels.

Then, in the middle of the month, the window slammed shut. All signs of the layers upon layers of Hall's personal history stretching back to 1994 were gone. In their place was a little search box and a fifteen-minute video titled Dark Night.

The video, which is still available on YouTube, opens with Hall's face, half in shadow, filling the frame. He begins: "What if inti--" Then he cuts himself off as his bleary eyes widen. He looks away, lets out an exasperated breath, and starts over:

So what if intimacy happens in quiet moments and if you're so busy talking and searching and looking and crying and yelling and--then you won't ever find it.

A subtitle appears below Hall's face: "I sort of had a breakdown in January 2005."

Hall was an accomplished storyteller in his own callow, motor-mouthed way. But this story emerged only fitfully, in raw fragments. Hall, it seemed, had met a woman. One who "opened me up like crazy." He'd fallen head over heels. Bliss! But the new relationship had clashed, somehow, with his confessional writing on the Web. His new beloved, Hall hinted, didn't relish the glare.

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do, that's like religion, that you practice with yourself, that's a dialogue with the divine, turns out to drive people away from you? . . . I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn't make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don't know what the fuck to do about it . . .

Dark Night played out its psychodramatics with Blair Witch-style lighting and confessional ferocity, like an Ingmar Bergman therapy scene reshot by a geeky art student. The video was awkward, sometimes embarrassing, and more than a little unnerving. It made you fear for Hall's mental state--you wanted to pick up the phone and talk him down from the ledge. Still, for all its raw atmospherics, it was hardly naive. Hall had been creating autobiographical media all his life, and most recently he'd been studying filmmaking at USC. Dark Night was, in its own ragged way, a calculated work, not some piece of "turn on the camera, then forget about it" verite.

It wasn't the soul-baring that made Dark Night a shocker. Rather, it was the prospect that Justin Hall's soul-baring days might be at an end. On the subject of self-exposure, Hall had always been an absolutist. When he began writing on the Web, the word transparency hadn't yet been drafted into service in its contemporary meaning: openness, no secrets, all questions answered. But transparency had been Hall's guiding principle from the start. He had turned his website into a glass house.

Only now, it seemed, he no longer wanted to live there.

In 1988, when Hall was thirteen, he got his first glimpse of the Internet. He'd already been online a few years, dialing up private bulletin-board services (BBSes) from his mom's computer in their Chicago home, looking for videogame tips, and sticking around to enjoy the camaraderie. The fun of tapping into a national BBS based in California ended quickly when his mother looked at the phone bill; from then on, hometown boards would have to do.

Hall's father was gone. An alcoholic, he'd killed himself when Justin was eight, a story Justin would later tell, prominently and unflinchingly, on his site. His mother, a successful lawyer, worked long hours and traveled a lot, so he was, as he put it, "raised by a series of nannies." In 1988 a new one arrived, a medical student at Northwestern who saw Justin's enthusiasm for going online and showed the youngster the nascent Internet, then a university-only enclave. (This was well before the Web's easy-to-use interface tamed the technical difficulties of using the Internet for the masses; it took geek tenacity just to connect.) "It wasn't just a bunch of fifteen-year-olds in Chicago on their computers," Hall says. "It was people all over the country. And the scope of what the people were talking about was fantastic." His gaze was drawn to Usenet, the collection of Internet-based forums that, in the pre-Web days, offered the most reward to an adolescent looking for online kicks. "People were getting nerdy there," Hall recalls, "about this specific Frank Zappa record, or this specific transgender bent, or this specific drug experience. I was extremely turned on."

Hall called the university and tried to get an Internet account for himself. Sorry, he was told, we don't just give them out. What does a teenager do in such circumstances? A teenager borrows a friend's password. But the Northwestern system administrators eventually figured out what Hall was up to and kicked him off.

Hall finally got his own Internet account when he went off to Swarthmore in September 1993. The dorm rooms there had just been networked; for Hall, this meant "up-all-night information." That December, John Markoff, the New York Times technology reporter, wrote an introduction to the new World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser, describing them to his readers as "a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." Hall read the article--on paper--and then went and downloaded Mosaic. "It was hugely exciting. Now you can use a mouse to get to all this information! Now you can put pictures and text on the same page!"

At that early date, the experts, and the money, agreed that the future of online communication was in the hands of the "big three" commercial online services (America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy); technology giants, such as Microsoft, Apple, and IBM; and cable companies like Time Warner, which were sinking fortunes into interactive TV. The Internet had been a backwater accessible only to...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307451364
ISBN 13 
9780307451361
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
404
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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