I sit in front of a blank screen, fingers idle.
Thinking about transition.
From childhood into adulthood, from old books and
childish terrors to adult preoccupations.
Soaking up CRT radiation, rivers of caffeine
slowly leeching the calcium and iron from my
body, convincing myself that I'm being "productive"
because I'm in front of the screen, generating words
and images.
Trying to find some content.
That's my adult preoccupation at this moment.
We try to convince ourselves that content is
what the Web wants, what the Web needs.
Content presented with a sense of style that
is appealing without being distracting,
stylish without being flashy, eye-catching
without being gaudy.
We have a variety of models, a variety of
arguments, all compelling, more in tandem
than one site could ever fulfill.
The Web as informational database: miles upon
miles of bulleted lists, anchored links, Lynx-
friendly course syllabi.
The Web as personal megaphone and resume; here's
me, here's my dog, here's my other friends with
their Mozilla-generated webpages, world without
end.
The web as advertising medium; Tide.com, Geocities
"buy a car online" Javascript pop-up targeted
marketing bulk email Purgatory.
The Web as interactive playground; ADSL-sucking
Shockwave Flash, dancing Pringles cans, crosswords
that are just like the ones in the paper, but NOT,
because you're playing crosswords on the WEB, dammit,
because there aren't enough crossword puzzles on
PAPER, are there?
The Web is this. The Web is not that. The Web
was never intended to be this, and was not
designed for that.
The truth is that the Web is what people want.
People put up what they want, and read what
they want. It's the saving grace and the pitiless
vice of the Web all rolled up into one.
Give someone a voice, and they will scream.
Make tools that even an idiot could use,
and an idiot will use them.
What, then, is the truth about what the Web wants?
The truth is porn. The truth is endless, daisy-
chained porn sites, infinite lists of links full
of empty promises and age-verification tease, like
that ball-busting coquette you knew in high school.
An endless panoply of sites linked together
like some unholy incestuous orgy, every link
leading to another link, nothing ever leading
to anything else. The human sexual appetite
expands to fill the space available, and in this
case, the space never ends.
The truth is Geocities, Tripod, Xoom
and Fortunecity, millions of users and pages,
animated email gifs spinning in some endless,
nonexistent digital breeze, half-megabyte
JPEGs of dogs and blurry high school photos
offered up in sacrifice to the gods of Please Click
Here. Accounts named "homesteads"; like some vast
and unyielding plain of garish, ugly front porches,
informing the world of the author's love of Calvin
and Hobbes, South Park and Dilbert.
The truth is the corporate site, consumergoods.com,
with useless, T1-friendly animations spreading
inviting arms like Belshazzar at the feasting table,
preaching the Gospel of Consumption to the unwary
surfer. The antithesis of content, empty of meaning,
cheerfully remorseless, a brightly-colored trap
for the soul.
The truth is that the porn sites proliferate and multiply
like Fantasia's brooms while the sites that make their
valiant stab at content shut down for lack of money
or lack of faith. While one online "design tips" site
after another wonders where the hell the content is,
Geocities racks up another million users, rank with
Java popup, Auto-by-Tel ads, and fourteen thousand
sites about the Redwings.
Where, then, is the content?
In this little box?
Maybe.
It seems doubtful.
Just as the Web becomes what is uploaded, the
content is defined by what the people look for.
If Redwings are your thing, you're in luck.
Want to find pictures of people with plastic
wrap over their faces being defecated on?
Well, today is your day, pal.
Anything is possible and everything is probable.
Wonder and terror.