Страница 112 из 155
At the time, there were no Web directories or search engines, other than very staid ones like the W3 Catalog from the University of Geneva and a “What’s New” page from NCSA at the University of Illinois. So Hall invented one for his site, which he elegantly titled “Here’s a Menu of Cool Shit.” Shortly thereafter, in an homage to Dostoevsky, he renamed it “Justin’s Links from the Underground.” It included links to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the World Bank, and websites created by beer co
Justin’s Links from the Underground became the spiky pathfinder for a proliferation of directories, such as Yahoo and then Lycos and Excite, that began to blossom later that year. But in addition to providing a portal to the wonderland of the Web, Hall created something weirdly beguiling that turned out to be even more significant: a ru
“I was on the literary magazine in high school,” he said, “and I had published some very personal things.” That became the recipe for his and many future blogs: stay casual, get personal, be provocative. He posted a picture of himself standing nude onstage that he had been prevented from using in his high school yearbook, along with the tale of the girl editors “giggling while checking out the black-and-white photo of my tweeter.” He later told the story of an evening of painful intercourse with a girl, after which his foreskin had swelled; it was illustrated with many close-ups of his genital situation. In so doing, he helped i
Hall’s willingness to push the boundaries of Too Much Information became a hallmark of blogging. It was cheekiness raised to a moral attitude. “TMI is like the deep lab data from all of our human experiments,” he later explained. “If you reveal TMI, it can make people feel a little less alone.” That was no trivial feat. Indeed, making people feel a little less alone was part of the essence of the Internet.
The case of his swollen foreskin was an example; within a few hours people from around the world posted comments offering their own stories, cures, and assurance that the condition was temporary. A more poignant case came from his postings about his father, an alcoholic who had committed suicide when Justin was eight. “My father was a wry, humanistic, sensitive man,” he wrote. “Also an intolerant spiteful bastard.” Hall recounted how his father would sing Joan Baez folk songs to him, but also down bottles of vodka and wave guns and berate waitresses. After Hall learned that he was the last person to talk to his father before he killed himself, he posted a poem: “What did we say / I wonder / and / what did it matter? / Could I have changed your mind?” These entries gave rise to a virtual support group. Readers sent in their own stories, and Hall posted them. Sharing led to co
A few months after he started his Web log, Hall managed to wrangle, through a tenacious volley of phone calls and emails, an internship for the summer of 1994 at HotWired.com in San Francisco. Wired magazine, under its charismatic editor Louis Rossetto, was in the process of creating one of the first magazine websites. Its executive editor was Howard Rheingold, an insightful online sage who had just published The Virtual Community, which described the social mores and satisfactions that came from “homesteading on the electronic frontier.” Hall became Rheingold’s friend and protégé, and together they engaged in a struggle with Rossetto over the soul of the new site.58
Rheingold felt that HotWired.com, in contrast to the printed magazine, should be a loosely controlled community, a “global jam session” filled with user-generated material. “I was part of Howard’s faction that really felt that community was important and wanted to build user forums and tools that made it easy for people to comment to each other,” Hall recalled. One idea they pushed was devising ways that members of the community could develop their own online identities and reputations. “The value is users talking to users,” Hall argued to Rossetto. “People are the content.”
Rossetto instead felt that HotWired should be a well-crafted and highly designed publishing platform, featuring rich imagery, that would extend the brand of the magazine and create a striking Wired-like identity online. “We have these great artists and we should feature them,” he argued. “We are going to make something beautiful and professional and polished, which is what the Web lacks.” Building a lot of tools for user-generated content and comments would be “too much of a sideshow.”59
The debate was waged in long meetings and impassioned email chains. But Rossetto prevailed, and his outlook, which was shared by many other print-world editors, ended up shaping the evolution of the Web. It became primarily a platform for publishing content rather than for creating virtual communities. “The era of public-access Internet has come to an end,” Rossetto declared.60
When Hall returned from his extended summer gig at HotWired, he decided to become an evangelist for the other side of the argument, believing that the public-access aspects of the Internet should be celebrated and supported. With less sociological sophistication than Rheingold but more youthful exuberance, he began to preach the redemptive nature of virtual communities and Web logs. “I’ve been putting my life online, telling stories about the people I know and the things that happen to me when I’m not geeking out,” he explained online after a year. “Talking about myself keeps me going.”
His manifestos described the appeal of a new public-access medium. “When we tell stories on the Internet, we claim computers for communication and community over crass commercialism,” he declared in one of his early postings. As someone who had spent hours on the Internet’s early bulletin boards when he was growing up, he wanted to recapture the spirit of the Usenet newsgroups and The WELL.
And so Hall became the Joh