Worlds, real & imagined

Very quietly, Rudolf Ammann is doing meticulous and assiduously-sourced work that sets up narratives of online history that engage with their protagonists but also test accepted narratives. This post from last year is a great example, and the comments from Dave Winer, Scott Rosenberg and others set up a fascinating dance of narratives.

I’m going to take very slight issue with the analysis: while I think the spare, link-based weblog set up a contrast to the long-form personal narrative that had previously held a certain amount of sway, my own recollection is close to Rosenberg’s: the distinction between the two forms was never as contentious or as zero-sum as the exchanges at SXSW 2000 made it out to be. That’s perhaps because of underlying personal relationships and a sense of common cause that transcended formal boundaries — what Heather* and Derek or Lance and Leslie were doing didn’t feel that dissimilar from Peter or Judith were doing around the same time. You could play around with the weblog format and maintain a zine/narrative site, perhaps in a subdirectory, perhaps a separate domain, and not feel like a traitor to the cause — or you could mix it up, because that’s what Justin Hall did, and everybody knew Justin’s site.

By 2000, there was, perhaps, a certain wistful regret that the hand-coded custom layouts and experimental design of {fray} and Colors and AfterDinner and 0sil8 were giving way to lower-maintenance templated sites, reflecting an era of browser messiness and dot-com craziness and increased demands on site creators’ time. (I’ll use this post to deliver my annual nudge at Kottke’s expense.) What appears in retrospect as conflict can also be read, perhaps more accurately, as a desire to give a proper send-off to the surfeit of effort in a craft superseded by production, even if subsequent production demands a new kind of craftsmanship.

Terms like ‘spirit’ don’t really suit analytical frameworks, but that’s where you find the continuity of the weblog era, in a group of people who have been engaged at the leading edge of the web for as long as I can remember, adapting to (and adapting) the forms that emerge.

*Heather’s non-bloggy jezebel.com is no longer in archive.org, perhaps on account of its current owners. This makes me sad.

My thinking about the online public sphere is, by necessity, shaped by many years’ work into the emergence of the public sphere in early modern Europe, which creates, in its silhouette, the idea of the private self. The CBC Ideas series on the origins of the modern public is both a testament to the Canadian broadcaster’s commitment to intellectually challenging radio — it’s Radio 3 territory, not NPR — and a trove of ideas to juxtapose with this new domain for identity and interaction.

Leslie Harpold’s Vox account (among others) becomes internet archaeology tomorrow.

(and this, from Simon Wistow.)

Update 1.10.2010: export counts for something, at least.

Thanks to Anna for sharing a snippet of her circumlocomotivation west of the Mississippi as part of The Snailr Project. Here’s postcard no. 29.

In September of 2000 there are thousands of weblogs: topic-oriented weblogs, alternative viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected by mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas. Traditional weblogs perform a valuable filtering service and provide tools for more critical evaluation of the information available on the web. Free-style blogs are nothing less than an outbreak of self-expression. Each is evidence of a staggering shift from an age of carefully controlled information provided by sanctioned authorities (and artists), to an unprecedented opportunity for individual expression on a worldwide scale. Each kind of weblog empowers individuals on many levels.

Rebecca Blood’s ‘Weblogs: A History and Perspective’ passed its tenth birthday a couple of weeks ago. It gets more valuable with age, as an aide-memoire to those who were around the web at the time, and a testament for those who weren’t. It identifies the connection between early weblogs and newer publishing platforms (Tumblr is old school) and the tensions and divergent motivations that now delineate the online landscape. But its closing thoughts of an adversarial future–

Our strength–that each of us speaks in an individual voice of an individual vision–is, in the high-stakes world of carefully orchestrated messages designed to distract and manipulate, a liability. We are, very simply, outnumbered.

–make me think, ten years on, of an orchestration has been done through envelopment, programmatically, and with a degree of complicity: a co-opting of mass participation that’s templated and textboxed and increasingly tied to a handful of gatekeepers.