2000-05-19
Dear Diary:

����Isn't it interesting how many people we know are becoming so highly textual?

����Me, I'm betting that's what the web will be remembered for ... not for the glitz, but for the fact that for the first time ever ordinary people had a simple, inexpensive way to get their words out.

An elaborate tin façade which once covered the front of a cheap frame house in Ottawa in an effort to make the house seem more upscale than it was.����Welcome to the revolution, folks.

����Bet you didn't realize that when you were putting up a web page extolling the wonders of your cat, Fluffy, or your passion for the old tin fa�ades they used to put on Victorian houses to make them seem posh ... well, I'll bet you didn't realize that you were a revolutionary, eh.

����After all, it's only words and maybe a few pictures, right?

����Words. Mostly they've been controlled by and written to please folks who had money and power. You won't see hieroglyphs telling the story of some guy who made pots for a living, and Homer wrote about gods and heroes, not about some guy who worked at a job he didn't like.

����Even when Guttenburg created the printing press and turned books from hideously expensive hand made objects to something that could be mass produced, he still didn't set words free.

����Instead, he created a professional writing class, a whole business based on controlling taste, selling words. If your words weren't mainstream enough, then it became more and more difficult to be published unless you had enough money to publish them yourself.

����Now, today, in the world of the Oprah fueled blockbuster, there is less and less room for words that aren't homogenized enough to appeal to a wide spectrum of people.

����In a world becoming ever more complex, the words open to us, the points of view we can experience through words, are being whittled down constantly.

����Clearly, it's not enough, and people are reacting in an interesting way. Here, in this little anarchist world of glowing dots on screens, as long as you can afford a computer and an internet connection, you can control words. You can publish yourself. People are doing just that.

����Kaffeine can publish a poem about love gone wrong, AnEnigma can protest child porn, and a young girl barely in her teens called Leah can talk about how anti-Semitism feels.

����At first glance, it seems as if there are few things more ephemeral than a web page. We have all hit more than our share of "404 Page Not Found" messages for sites that have disappeared from the ether. But perhaps we should amend that 404 message to read "Gone But Not Forgotten".

����See, the man who owns Alexa, the browser add-on that catalogues the web, has been saving every page his program catalogued since 1996 (13.8 terabytes of data and counting.)

����One day, perhaps, your great-great-great-grandchild is going to read a poem you wrote, find out how much you loved Fluffy, or that you had a black strap on dildo called Sir Lancelot.

����The lives, interests and best of all the words of all we ordinary folks are being preserved.

����Oh my.

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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Want to delve into my sordid past?
She's mellllllllllllllting - Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012 - Back off, Buble - Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 - Dispersed - Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 - Nothing comes for free - Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 - None of her business - Friday, Nov. 04, 2011 -


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This template is a riff on a design by the truly talented Quinn. Because I'm a html 'tard, I got alot of pity coding to modify it from Ms. Kittay, a woman who can make html roll over, beg, and bring her her slippers. The logo goodness comes from the God of Graphics, the Fuhrer of Fonts, the one, the only El Presidente. I smooch you all. The background image is part of a painting called Higher Calling by Carter Goodrich which graced the cover of the Aug. 3, 1998 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

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