Most Likely to Take Over the World

I suppose, as is the nature of the internet, that I should make this first post some fumbling attempt to seem challenged by the entire idea of writing online, or about myself, or about myself via a public forum with such immediate feedback as this. Usually, the posts involve some sort of amazed acknowledgement about how incredibly different, novel, fascinating, etc. all of this is, how I’m not sure what I’ll use this blog for, but I’m so glad you stopped by to read it.

The problem with such cliched first posts, for me at any rate, is that I’ve been doing this a long time. Before there were blogs, tweets, and social networking sites, people paid private companies money to host their websites. They downloaded and installed FTP clients, bought books (or downloaded and dissected source code from pre-existing sites), and coded their own websites. Journalers or diarists, as they called themselves, then uploaded their entries using the FTP programs onto their private web hosts’ servers, and voila. Several hours later, their most intimate thoughts were published on the internet. Of course, as the whole purpose of publishing one life so publically is attention, they created newsgroups, webrings, and message boards where they could collaborate and commisserate. There was even an annual conference, JournalCon, to gather us from all parts of the world to discuss what we have done and what this all could mean for the future.

I attended the first JournalCon, in 2000. I was member #40 on the WebRing Online Diaries. In 1995, I was one of a handful of diarists. I had journal on a GeoCities page (and still have a stock certificiate for Yahoo! in my parents’ basement somewhere — a token for early adopters), then a page hosted by my email provider, and when that grew too large, I began paying for my own hosting and in 1998 registered my first domain: bitterfame.com

The idea was that I was going to be a writer, even though fights with the high school editors at my alma matter’s newspaper and literary magazine all but guaranteed my rejection. So, I turned to the faceless masses of the internet for validation of my writing, and I’ve been here ever since. The domain was sold out from under me by my first webhost when I missed a month’s payment. So  I migrated to LiveJournal. Then to my own domain again. In the meantime, I worked on pieces that found their way into online magazines in the early days of internet publishing: milleniumSHIFT, RavenElectrik, and BellaOnline. I was also picked up by a start up publishing house to write a few pieces for anthologies of teen internet writers; the publishing company went out of business in 2003 and the books are out of print, though I do have a copy or two in my living room.

So, being a part of internet writing and publishing from it’s stumbling toddler years, I don’t feel amazed at the new technology — I’ve stopped writing my own HTML code because I never stopped to learn stylesheets, but I’ve kept up-to-date on what technology is out there. I do not feel awkward or faun awkwardness because to do so would be disingenuous to the fact that to nearly 300 daily readers in the 1990s, I exposed my tender, gawky teenage growth spurt and angsty rebellions, of which there were many.

So, instead, I’ve written something of a meta post. There will be more like this, because it is who I am, and how I came of age in the digital age.

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