Rebecca Blood’s “weblogs: a history and perspective” did it to me again. I enjoyed her perspective on the start of what Jon Barger called in December of 1997 “weblogs”, but I instantly was sucked into a rabbit hole. I was instantly reminded of what I was doing around that time. Let me explain.
She states the beginning of the community of blogging as starting in 1998. This is when Jesse James Garrett (editor’s note: that is my brother’s name, sans Garrett) began compiling the first well-known list of bloggers and their sites. I looked through the list and noticed one that I know that I visited back then, http://www.dotnet.com/~gijoe/which on the list was listed as “My Cluttered Desk”. I can’t remember if it was because of the catchy title or if it was because of a search for GI Joe (used to be a big collector). At any rate, this started a wave of nostalgia in my mind and increased the rate at which I went through different rabbit holes.
I was pretty new to online activities back then, but I have always been exposed to technology early. We seemed to have had some sort of advanced technology in our house all the time. My dad bought one of the first VCRs in Fairbanks, Alaska. I want to say it was in 1980. I’m pretty sure that I was four. That thing was a tank and lasted for years. The first computer was bought for my dad on Father’s Day when I was six. A decked-out Commodore 64. It was awesome. I took computer classes in high school and learned numerous skills that lasted for years but sadly have eluded me since. My junior year of high school I was introduced to online gaming. A friend of mine was playing a M.u.d. on a laptop in the hallway at school. For those of you who don’t know, a M.u.d was/is an online text-based MMO. I was explaining this concept to my 14-year-old son, and he said: “Glad I didn’t live back then, sounds like the Dark Ages.” Needless to say, I’m not sure if he will make it to his sixteenth birthday… When I was 21, I bought my first computer. That Christmas I did my first computer upgrade by myself. The following year I bought a Gateway (at a Gateway store) that was out of date 2 months later, and I was stuck with payments for like four years. That covers up until 1998-99 when Garrett’s list of 23 weblogs known to be in existence was published and Peter Merholz decided he was going to pronounce a weblog as “wee-blog” according to the article. Thankfully that didn’t last for long. That was a busy time for me. 1998 was the year I was first married. I had my spiffy computer and spent half my time playing “Asheron’s Call” (the first MMORPG) and Starsiege: Tribes.
There is a lot of history here that speaks of online communities that Rebecca Blood either isn’t aware of or simply chooses to ignore it for her article. Weblogging, or at least the way she describes it, wasn’t the first online community. She had to start somewhere though, but in all due fairness online communities started several years earlier than she mentions, to say nothing of the communities surrounding the original intentions of the internet. I do remember there being an explosion of blogs around the time that she suggests because that was how I did my reading. I spent whatever time I wasn’t gaming online being fascinated with what I considered a better way to stay informed.
Blood mentions “Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view… This profound experience may be most purely realized in the blog-style weblog. Lacking a focus on the outside world, the blogger is compelled to share his world with whoever is reading…These fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.”
I’m not trying to be super critical, here or anywhere else, and I am not taking out my frustrations on anyone or anything (unless your one of the guys that I PVP against in Destiny 2, then all bets are off). I just like to put out there a different perspective, one that is not a regurgitated viewpoint of others and intended to get people to think. That doesn’t make my posts critical, just an alternative view. That being said, her viewpoint of the importance of blogging seems to be a little self-centered. She said the most important side-effect of blogging was that she started to value her own point of view. She also said that she “discovered” her own interests. I might have used the phrase “broadening my horizons”, it implies that it’s not about you, but more about the journey. Also, the danger of saying that your viewpoint about yourself is the most important thing about the experience lays aside what I consider the main reasons for being a part of an online community: feeling a sense of connection, being a part of something bigger, maybe helping others through action or providing information that you value. Making the importance of one of the more popular functions of the internet so self-centered feels a bit geocentric to me, being a little self-centered and perhaps outdated, considering the time that the article was written. It’s an interesting way to look at things, but the reality is the sun does not revolve around us, but the other way around.
William J. Heinecke 