There's No Page Like Home
By Don Oldenberg
Washington Post, Tuesday, July 23, 1996
(reprinted by permission)
In the 2 1/2 years since Justin Hall started putting his life on-line, the 21-year-old has received death threats, marriage proposals, sexual enticements, hate mail, business offers and requests for advice.
The intensity of the feedback only encourages him: Nearly every day, this baby-faced, streaky-blond Net freak, who is taking time off from college and living in California while giving new meaning to the term "self published", cranks out paragraph after paragraph. Mostly, he focuses on one subject, his singular area of expertise other than the Internet. Hall writes about himself. Then he posts it on-line, where he has gradually accumulated a world-wide audience of thousands who read him.
Want to know about his father's suicide? It's there with commentary and insight. Want to know about his current girlfriend? There, too, photograph included. His hairstyle? His college years? Yup. His sexual exploits? Pictures of him naked? Of him wearing a dress, lipstick, mascara? Uh-huh. What he did for today? What he thought about? Everything you ever might have wanted to know about Justin Hall is there on his home page.
In a world where celebrity often is created by nothing more than exposing oneself to the unflinching public eye. Hall is achieving celebrity status-at least among those entangled by the World Wide Web. In an era when privacy is an endangered asset, increasing numbers of Internet-savvy people like Hall are building electronic sites where they introduce themselves virtually, sometimes immediately for all comers to read. Guilty of excess by most standards in a medium where few standards are yet defined, Hall and others like him are at the forefront of an on-line cultural trend that may one day soon give most of us our 15 bytes of fame on the Internet.
Called "home pages," these autobiographical nooks are technically the same kind of Web sites created by corporations to put their commercial presence on the Internet--except those are taking World Wide Web personally.
"You put up five poems about your dad and about your girlfriend, all of sudden...you've got to kind of tell the story about them," says Hall, whose home page started modestly as a place where he posted a "hotlist" of the Web sites he found during his daily hours of surfing the Internet. He began adding personal information to give the reviews context, then some poetry, before one thing led to another and the personal material overran the reviews.
"Then it was like, if I'm writing about my girlfriend, I should write about where I met her-- at college," says Hall, who started toying with computers at age 7, got his first modem at age 12, his first e-mail address at age 18. "All those pieces fit into a coherent whole, which turns out to be your autobiography."
Nobody has a good count on the number of home pages up and running, though indications are that their presence on the Internet is expanding rapidly as more and more people make being on-line a regular part of their lives. "Things like home pages are difficult to figure out totals," says Don Heath, president of the Reston-based Internet Society, who adds that keeping any kind of statistics about Internet activity has become difficult. But, like any kind of new of new Web site, he explains, every home page is registered as a domain name-and those are almost doubling each year "with no break in sight."
The Washington D.C. Personal Home Page Registry, which helps to create home pages and provides an on-line directory of personal sites, lists more than 2,200 local home pages. America Online, the nation's largest on-line server, started offering its 6 million members the ways and means and on-line space to create home pages last summer. Since then, says an AOL spokeswoman, about 750,000 AOL users have done it.
Statistics aren't people, but home pages virtually are-- at least in what they tell about who creates home pages and why.
Most people with home pages right now are "eager adopters" says Michelle Weil, a clinical psychologist in Orange Calif., who specializes in the psychology of technology. "They are folks who love technology, who jump on board all the latest gadgets and options. For them, technology is like a toy."
Since only about 10 percent of Americans know how to access on-line services, Weil says, the number of people with home pages is still a tiny fraction of the population, and "It's a very good feeling psychologically to feel like you are at the cutting edge and one of the avante-garde."
Doug Block says the most interesting sites he has visited on-line are "people with time on their hands-a lot of young people and very old people."
A documentary filmmaker based in New York City who is making a film titled "Home Page," which focuses on young Net pioneers who have hoisted their dirty-- and clean-- laundry up the electric flagpole, Block says he is using the home page "as a metaphor for the way you piece together your identity in terms of what you want to reveal and portray to the world. I find home pages fascinating the same way I find people's snapshots fascinating-not so much because they are good photographers, but because there is so much meaning you can read from them."
By following links from one personal Web site to another, Block has found intriguing home pages, such as Justin Hall's extensive one's with full-color photographs and dozens of hypertext links to yet more personal commentary, and mundane ones only a mother could love.
Typical home pages? The voice of introspection speaks loudly. Poetry abounds-- some of it good. Tributes to deceased loved ones, talk of hobbies, book lists, favorite movies, updates on current events in one's life-at their most basic, home page resemble multi-recipient family letters.
More unusual are the highly creative home pages, like the one by the man who wears and camera on his head all day, transmitting whatever he sees to his site. Block particularly liked the daily accounts from a man and woman about their real life affair. "We read about their affairs all the time," he says, "but don't get all the perspectives on it, certainly not as it's happening. And they got reader feedback."
As for Hall's home page, Block says he's seen nothing else on-line that quite compares. "He is sort of the human embodiment of the spirit of the Internet," he says. "What he does touches on so many issues of privacy and free speech and self-disclosure. It's like somebody has a cable TV access program and has made a Hollywood movie."
Yet the shocking intimacy doesn't surprise Block, who considers himself a private person . "I see it all the time on-line," he says. "It happens for the same reason you would pour your heart out to a stranger or to a therapist, and not to the people closest to you. I think home pages have much to tell us about our human needs for attention, to make a mark."
Larry Rosen believes the growth of the home page phenomenon has more to do with a yearning for a sense of community. "I know people who have home pages, and when you ask them why, they say they want to choreograph a sense of belonging that they are not getting elsewhere," says the professor of psychology at California State University, Dominquez Hills, who is also a partner with Weil at Byte Back Technological Consulting Services.
"It is belonging in the bigger sense that 'I have this home page that shows who I am' and 'Who else would like to belong with me?' In essence, it is a way of harking back to the '50s and '60s, when it was clear you had a community. In that sense, the World Wide Web presents a way to recapture neighborhood."
Rosen says he doesn't know if the trend will achieve its potential as a tight knit community. "These home pages come and go," he says, admitting he initially "felt funny" constructing the personal side of his own home page, but intends to add cooking and travel commentaries soon. "But you do see a growing sense of community, you do see people talking to the same people."
Sense of community has apparently inspired America Online to announce it's new and improved home page service, which it hopes will one day make home pages nearly as standard as e-mail. "We're announcing in August a new tool, a personal publisher tool called the "50-second Webpage," David Gang, America Online vice president for marketing, says of the six-step process that requires no techie-know-how. AOL already offers 10 megabytes per account and 2 megs per individual for creating home pages at no extra charge.
"With our Web pages," says Gang, "we're expecting people to put up their personal emotions and express how they feel and what their interests are."
North Arlington resident Teri Centner warns potential readers that her home page is "mostly interesting if you know me and are wondering what I'm up to."
In it, the MIT graduate and U.S. Air Force captain explores her "Heinz 57" cultural heritage, her early life that landed her in Waldorf, life in college, her sorority years, her friends (with links to their home pages), her brother Fluffy, and his filmmaker friend Mike. She also links to extensive information page she maintains about Winnie the Pooh and a page of her free advice on how to set up home pages.
Centner first started thinking about a home page when she spotted those of former classmates at MIT. But it took AOL's offer this year of free space to prompt her to create one, using resources and instructions she found on-line, "In creating and maintaining 'my space,' " she says, "I have been able to share a lot about what's inside me with the world at large and leave my itty bitty mark on the world."
Besides, adds Centner, the home page has been good for her ego. "This might sound silly," she says, "but some people are really impressed when you tell them you have a personal home page."
When Betsy Peto put up her home page last February, she initially felt uneasy posting personal information. "Then I decided that thugs hadn't yet invaded the Net, and I would risk it," says the publications manager at Quantum Research Corp. in Bethesda.
Comparatively simple, Peto's home page includes a personal history about growing up as a Navy child, going to school with Connie Chung, becoming a social worker in Baltimore, joining a commune in Colorado. Her hypertext links take readers to her personal guide to current movies, to a local weather report, to The Washington Post's new on-line site, to the home pages of a few friends and to a "Hi Mom" tribute to her deceased mother.
"Afterward, I was so pleased with myself I wanted to print up bumper stickers 'Let me tell you about my home page.' I resisted the urge to hand out the URL (on-line address) to people on the street," says Peto.
Since then, she has received e-mail from people named Peto in Seattle, Montreal and Australia who saw her home page, as well as a high school classmate. The downside? "Once the rush of accomplishment wears off," she says-- about a month--"It's difficult to keep updating it."
Since acquiring a digital camera to put better photography on his site, Justin Hall says he has fallen three weeks behind in his daily updates. But at its peak, he spent four or five hours a day on his home page-- and he's given a lot of thought as to why.
"The Web is the first semi-permanent, unlimited, world wide exhibition space." Hall explains on his home page under the heading "Why the Web?" "Think of it as a never ending world's fair, where anyone can set up a booth....You can forge your site in your own image. You can be unique because there are no expectations. Most people set up personal home pages out of nothing other than love and curiosity."
Meanwhile, as Doug Block makes his documentary, he is creating his own home page. Primarily a resource for aspiring documentarians, it has a small but growing personal link that is keeping him awake at night.
"A home page is this place where people open up their lives and their homes to the world. And some people will invite anyone in no matter how unkempt it is." he says of those who bare their souls on-line. "They're like people inviting you into their home and showing you far more than you ever really wanted to know. I find it inspiring. The voyeur in me is thrilled...but I'm giving a lot of thought to my own before I open up my doors.
Copyright © 1996-1999 D.B.
Block. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1996-1999 D.B. Block. All Rights Reserved