Can the web be fun again?
It just struck me that I’ve been on the Net for 20 years this month. I remember distinctly: I was fifteen years old, and a month or so into grade nine. A friend of mine that had been at some high-brow mathematics camp during the summer (I had been reading Orwell’s 1984 during the same period, I recall) and came back with a Datapac account, which was one of the only ways that an individual –at least in our neck of the woods– could access what was becoming the Internet. I had been playing around with tiny local BBSes and QuantumLink (an early large and very expensive BBS service from the States), which at least gave me menus to explore things, get little files, and drop messages into forums. My friend had almost no interest in his account, so he gave me the login and password. I fired up my Commodore 64, jumped into my Kermit terminal, and did the manual dial-up. Mere minutes later, I was face-to-face with a black screen and a blinking white cursor. I started typing commands randomly: “dir”, “help”, “list” and other logical requests gave no information, only errors. Since there were no books at our tiny mall bookstore covering this strange experience, and there were no easily-accessible online sources of information, I could only keep guessing at commands. Eventually, I started figuring things out. Like pieces of a puzzle that suddenly materialise and form part of the broader picture, each new tidbit was not only exciting but hinted at greater things to come. Sad to say, the ensuing year or two of alternating frustration, experimentation and exhilaration was one of the last times I truly had fun on the Internet. Until now.
I’ve wracked my brain many times trying to figure out the reasons why I loved my early experiences so much, compared to recent years. Perhaps it was because I was exploring a hitherto-unknown world and living by my wits. Maybe it was because everything was new and fresh and unspoiled by modern commercialism. Or, given my awkward pre-trendy-geek existance, perhaps I was holding out hope for meeting others of my preternatural kind.
But I’m pretty sure the reason is this: at that age, technology was only a hobby. As the years went on, fewer people wanted to avail themselves of my other skills, demonstrating only curiosity and fascination with my technical abilities. After finishing university and teaching English for a year-long contract, the province’s teachers’ glut forced me into taking a job with a fledgeling multimedia company, where I was responsible for producing CD-ROMs and websites. It was interesting at first, but when a hobby becomes a job, one often loses any sense of enjoyment in it. It was no different for me.
Flash-forward till last year. I’d spent ten years ping-ponging among various marketing, communications, technical and academic organisations, almost always doing consulting, producing multimedia, programming or handling technical training. The fragments of the dot-com bomb were still lodged in my skin, and most people I knew from the industry had disappeared from the face of the earth. The days of jet-setting around the continent to offer advice were long gone, figments of idealistic imaginations, and now I sat in a small town in central Newfoundland betwildered at the strange twists and turns of Silicon Valley greed and pseudo-inspired nonsense. Each day, I woke up hating myself more for putting endless hours of study and practice into skills that became obsolete six months later. For all the 100-hour work-weeks, there was nothing to show except some out-of-date machines, some vague memories of enthusiastic ventures long faded into the ether, and a burned-out and unhealthy shell of a body….
But now… now is different. The web is fun again.
Part of the reason, I ascribe to not needing to produce commercial websites any more. There’s something disheartening about expending all your creative energies to be greeted with lacklustre response from businessmen and the ultimate question, “How will this contribute to the bottom line?” I have also given up almost all programming, as most of the applications I would need to produce are already available in some form, especially in the Open Source world. While I used to enjoy the challenges inherent in crunching code, the left side of my brain would frequently seize control over the right side, and any creativity would be overruled by my steel-cold analytical machine. Imagination atrophied, and the number of times I would be struck by heart-pounding satori moments became few and far between. My recent decision to walk away from all commericalism and technical doldrum, and instead concentrate on my future in academics, was one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made.
But there’s something else, something that I’ve watched for years only as an outsider: the social and personal aspects of the web. I’m not talking about the occasional idle chatter on IRC or IM, or the god-awful “social networking sites.” I’m talking about personal presence and how it ultimately connects you to others.
I started this blog as an experiment only a month or two ago. At the time, I was convinced that I would let it slide (as I’ve seen so many others do), and that it would be successful if I only had a couple of friends tune in every few days. I installed WordPress, constructed the template rather quickly, and got in the habit of writing a few entry drafts per day while I ate or waited for something. With only an odd post here and there, my blog address mentioned in a few places, I figured a few people might wind up idly clicking on my page and finding an item or two of interest. Then something happened that I didn’t expect. When I viewed my stats for the first time a week or two ago, I found I was up to nearly 1400 unique visitors per day. I get plenty of email either wanting to chat, or giving me advice, or asking for mine. I’ve even been contacted by several of my ‘Net heroes, whom I thought would never give me the time of day. I don’t say all this as an ego boost: indeed, it’s more an illustration of how setting up an inviting “homestead” on the Net can suddenly bring neighbours a-callin’.
Meanwhile, I’m having more and more fun with web technologies that are getting increasingly creative while having less of a need for “technical intervention” (which is essentially what geeks like me used to have to contend with, in order to get anything of substance done). Wikis, blogs (writing, commenting, trackbacks), Flickr, del.icio.us, online courses, Gallery, groupware, Moodle, Gmail… for the first time I can truly enjoy the web without being a techie and having to roll up my sleeves. While I know, deep down, that I’ll always be technologically-inclined, this part of my nature is beginning to manifest itself in the best ways to use and manipulate technology, not create it, or sweat out its issues and inconsistencies to make a buck. I’ve decided to leave that to others who genuinely care about it, and I couldn’t be happier. Snapping a picture of my newborn son, and sending it the web for relatives to view, is far more intrinsically rewarding to me than slogging through any amount of code that silently powers the system behind the scenes.
I’ve found joy again. And ironically, it’s because of the very technologies that brought me to the brink of self-destruction….
Add comment October 18th, 2004