Plug Me In
It was the summer of 1995 when I got my first modem. Its speed was 2400 bpm. I sat for hours at the computer, reading message boards (first ever visited: a Barry Manilow fan board) and visiting chat rooms on Prodigy’s online service. Soon, I made the move to the increasingly popular AOL. Within 6 months I had my own web site, doling out fitness information. A few months after that, I quit my lucrative job at Bloomberg Financial Markets to make my living off of web site banner ads and web site design. Banner ads and content-pushing were going to make every young enterprising techie into a millionaire and web site design fees were on the rise. Everyone was jumping on the dot-com bandwagon, but within a few years it was evident that profit was neither guaranteed nor unlimited, as it had once seemed. The bubble had burst.
When I look back at the early days of the world wide web, I am astounded how quickly technology has moved in the past 10 years. The web now has a different look and feel. While the bottom line remains making money, it’s much more personal than it used to be. Instant messaging, Google and blogging have become household words. I just read a statistic that says 100,000 blogs are being created every day. While I haven’t always been at the vanguard of progress and technology, I’ve never stopped paying attention to the web and have always greeted each advance with eager anticipation. I remember being enamored with listserves. Now it’s blogging.
I came across a blog this evening that made me think about the nature of the web. This site - PostSecret – is a place where anyone can share their dirty little secret. Some of the “secrets” are full of hope and inspiration. Some are a cry for help. Some are probably just a big joke. And that blog is an outlet for all of them. It seems to me that the web is exactly that: a big outlet that we can all “plug into” to fulfill some need “virtually” that’s not fulfilled in “reality.” The need is different from person to person, but I think all of us web-surfers have it. So, as Neo says in The Matrix, “Plug me in!”