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T A B L E__T A L K Is your computer year 2,000 compliant? Is your bank's? Discuss the millennium bug in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The big chilly Razorfish among the sharks America Online vs. the "Net nobility" Going once, going twice and growing like crazy Where's the rest of me? - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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BY SIMON FIRTH | Last month Alexis Massie presented readers of her online journal with another honest and affecting piece of autobiographical prose. "Sometimes I wish this had all never happened," she wrote. "I only know how to take what's in my heart and shove it onto a screen, both good and bad, secure in the knowledge that the people to whom it is relevant will read it. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. But it holds little appeal for me and I don't think I want to do it anymore." In many ways that day's entry was a classic example of the form. Direct, personal, honest, almost painful to read and yet compelling too, it's typical of the best of a genre of Web writing that's finally taking off in popularity -- the online diary. Yet here is Massie, who's also the creator of the respected personal-narrative Web 'zine AfterDinner, bidding the genre farewell. "It's grown dull. Tedious," she writes. And not only will she no longer be regularly baring her soul to the world, but it seems she's writing an obituary for the whole diary phenomenon. Web diarists are now "slowing down, drifting away, and not publishing at all, abandoning unfinished projects, flailing in redirection and redesign, coming to no real conclusions and no more happiness." "The true writing talent," Massie concludes, "is hiding, drifting away to other mediums, or not publishing at all." Can this really be true? For those of us who've become avid readers, even addicts, of online diaries, it would be a disaster. We'll never know if Diane sells her screenplay. Or if the bad vibes Lizzie has asked everyone to send her downstairs neighbor will get the dreadful woman to move out. Kymm's wry reports brighten many of our days. And Justin's only just started his new job. What about the 4,000 or so who check in with him daily to see how he's getting on? While two years ago there were less than 50 people keeping regular online journals, or diaries, there are now, by one count, nearly 500. Over the past year their collective efforts have been steadily attracting more attention and readers. Can they really have reached not only their peak popularity but also their creative apex? If you talk to Massie, you discover that her disillusionment is to some degree the price of having been a pioneer. She began her diary back in the Web's Jurassic age -- August of 1995. The first online diarists, she says, didn't really "think anyone else was reading them." But they were read and imitated. Many of the biggest journal "fans" began online journals themselves, and soon everyone ended up mostly writing about each other. Some of them got famous, others got resentful. "After a while," says Massie, "it started getting very negative." It's a story familiar to anyone who has been in on the start of any online community. Still, is it inevitable that all Web diaries, and diarists, will go the same way? Massie worries that it is. She wanted the online diary to be a vehicle for a raw baring of the soul, an unreflected-upon accounting of ideas and emotion. That's proven to have been a naive hope -- the Web is clearly too public, too interactive, too instant. But has it really become impossible for writers to broadcast daily dispatches from the depths of their hearts as a sustainable and rewarding creative enterprise? Arguably not. While many of the movement's pioneers may be tired and disillusioned, the genre shows plenty of signs of life -- of blossoming, even, into something remarkable: a new literary form that allows writers to connect with readers in an excitingly new way. N E X T_P A G E .|. Tales of relationships and lost dreams, adultery and skinny-dipping parties ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE |
