| February 23, 2000 | The "C" Word |
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Yesterday evening when I returned home from my start-up job (I'm a Product Manager for Scour) at (the not unusual time of) 10pm, Jeff began lamenting the changes he has seen in the web over the past few years. He ranted and raved against consumerism and e-commerce and talked about how the Web has moved away from what it was initially all about -- a community of diverse personal expression, with all of its clumsiness, wackiness and arcane beauty. Strangely, despite the fact that I have had a personal website since 1995, when I was a senior at Vassar and built a \personal site called "The Dungeon" with my close friend Mindy who shared and encouraged my technological obsessions, I played devil's advocate with Jeff and argued for at least an hour with him -- asking why e-commerce was *so* bad. After all, e-commerce (and the future promise of e-commerce) is what allowed and continues to allow me and him to fall into lucrative and somewhat creative web jobs. We argued passionately for at least an hour about whether content and commerce can mix without corrupting the content. And both of our arguments contained numerous contradictions. He raged against consumerism ("Fight Club" style), but admitted that he loves IKEA. I allowed that there are some huge media conglomerates controlling what gets said/written about movies, books, and politics, but then added my purposely inflammatory closing remark, "We were born to sell out." Sure, I get pissed that I never have time to update my personal website because I'm burnt out on the web after enduring 50-plus hours of eyestrain per week at my day job. There are only so many hours per day a person can spend in front of a computer monitor with hands and fingers making tiny movements on mouses and keyboards without suffering from eyestrain or repetitive stress injury as longtime web diarist Justin Hall does. And I have bills to pay. A whole lotta bills. Ever since my first job working as a copywriter at Monster.com I have always heard managers and higher-ups proclaiming that "Content is king" while asking their creative teams to come up with some infotainment and advertorials. So, as my annoyance with my own laziness (or exhaustion?) and apathy (or web burn-out?) was reaching a melt-down point --(would I ever give my personal website a much-needed overhaul -- fix links, change outdated information, etc?), I noticed an article this morning on Wired, called "The Web The Way It Was" which talked about something which I had noticed for the first time last summer when I noticed that someone with a blog had linked to my website. Perhaps Blogger or one of these easily-updated sprawling blogging tools was just the solution I needed to get myself writing in my web journal on a regular basis. Labels: jeff, scour, startup, web posted by Jess Barron @ 2:18 PM 
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