I hope you don't mind the rant and is not too boring...
I find fascinating that we are still musing over the mitosis of writing and its media du jour. It is very..., ourobory? Reading this sent me looking into my own outstanding footprint in the Web, which, as you well know, isn't the beginning of the media. I wish I still had access to my early forays on dialup BBS, mailing lists, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL... The latter account I still hold for sentimental reasons, even though I don't use it (although I have mine blocked to incoming messages, my wife still does use her AOL email address attached to my account). Funny, I was dipping my fingers into AOL so early that my username there is LEAR, hence the sentimentality. A couple of years later, when it skyrocketed, you couldn't get any meaningful username without using a string numbers attached to it or something akin to random generated passwords.
For outstanding I mean things you can find in the WayBackMachine of Archive.org, like this page I created in 1994, the same year Netscape was released, for a company I used to work (I point to 1994 because the WBM didn't start caching sites until 1996, which is the earliest date for the site there): https://web.archive.org/web/19961105105010/http://www.gnamaritime.com/
Then in 1999, Blogger popped up and long form writing online started at its earnest. I supported Blogger, the idea of it, until it was swallowed by Google in 2003. That pissed me off and sent to NetSol to register my first domain name and, armed with MovableType and climbing a cool learning curve, publishing my own blogs there in 2003, one in English, another in Spanish and the third a photoblog. They are, zombie-like, still there. I don't have any tattoos but I hear you can't stop at one... Same happens with domain names. I've a bunch of them because I like their names and ever hoping to monetize them, like Datitla, or Titilos, born out of poetry; or Sorocabana, born out of nostalgia for gone Montevidean places, for example.
I said you sent me looking for my early outstanding footprint because I felt I needed to go back to my own genesis in the media, my own semi-abandoned relics, to reach the point of the present of your note and then project my mind into the future you see there. Some of those old posts look foreign, even to me. Some are political in nature (Bush's war, etc.). Some are interesting, like this one: http://www.sorocabana.net/cambios/2005/03/22/la_vida_sin_may/ Thanks to that retrospective I found that the lady mentioned there, Rebecca Milans, another fellow Uruguayan, was still writing in her blog until last year! Talk about a blast from the past! I haven't read her musings for well over ten years! I thought that just finding that was worthy of sharing all this with you. If you read a bit of her blog, especially her very early posts, you'll see why.
Well, just a long rant to point at a grain of sand (hers) in a giant beach of online writing out there. Some literary fortunes were made in those early days, when agents started scouting blogs for hardcopy publishing. The media is still evolving, as you point out. Writing is still at the same level of angst as ever. Apologies for the long wind...
Luis, nothing makes me happier than engagement such as yours.
Writing is one of the great psychic engines of our species, second only to music and cities. Like psychedelics and coding—with which it more than overlaps—writing is going nowhere, and through media like Twitter—which functionally alter how we write and, by extension, how we think and act—it has become as central to the everyday lives of many people as reading once was. If anything, writing is only now reaching the seamlessness of “water in water.”
Though too quickly consigned to the specialist’s shelf, the scrutiny of literary forms and of the history of writing yield exceptional epochal markers. They have also sped-up to the point of indiscernibility in the age of the Internet, which makes them rather difficult to study.
Even so, the current relationship between writing publishing and reading—the mutant troika—is among the most intriguing feedback loops we are immersed in.
And there is a very real sense in which everything I write is about writing. I very much enjoyed your autogenealogy above, and hope to slowly share mine in The Bride Stripped substack, which will be more personal than this one.
[You also made me miss Montevideo, which I hope to visit soon: it’s really been too long].
A last, and only seemingly gratuitous, note: so much can be inferred from anybody through their writing it’s shocking we do it in public at all. We really cannot help ourselves.
"A last, and only seemingly gratuitous, note: so much can be inferred from anybody through their writing it’s shocking we do it in public at all. We really cannot help ourselves."
No, we can't. That squishy machine in the osseous cavity will stop at nothing when properly prompted. Not for the benefit of any external body but for itself, lest the constant chatter will drive it mad. It is a release of sorts, like pulling a splinter, in most cases, or something orgasmic-like, when you hit the right chord and it resonates beyond ourselves. Yes, 90% of the time it exposes us like it exposes the long coated man on 5th Ave, flashing unsuspecting ladies, when in fact he's got shamefully little to "expose".
My only wish is that, whatever I'm able to infer with my occasional droppings, isn't too dreadful, like Kopi luwak beans...
I hope you don't mind the rant and is not too boring...
I find fascinating that we are still musing over the mitosis of writing and its media du jour. It is very..., ourobory? Reading this sent me looking into my own outstanding footprint in the Web, which, as you well know, isn't the beginning of the media. I wish I still had access to my early forays on dialup BBS, mailing lists, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL... The latter account I still hold for sentimental reasons, even though I don't use it (although I have mine blocked to incoming messages, my wife still does use her AOL email address attached to my account). Funny, I was dipping my fingers into AOL so early that my username there is LEAR, hence the sentimentality. A couple of years later, when it skyrocketed, you couldn't get any meaningful username without using a string numbers attached to it or something akin to random generated passwords.
For outstanding I mean things you can find in the WayBackMachine of Archive.org, like this page I created in 1994, the same year Netscape was released, for a company I used to work (I point to 1994 because the WBM didn't start caching sites until 1996, which is the earliest date for the site there): https://web.archive.org/web/19961105105010/http://www.gnamaritime.com/
Then in 1999, Blogger popped up and long form writing online started at its earnest. I supported Blogger, the idea of it, until it was swallowed by Google in 2003. That pissed me off and sent to NetSol to register my first domain name and, armed with MovableType and climbing a cool learning curve, publishing my own blogs there in 2003, one in English, another in Spanish and the third a photoblog. They are, zombie-like, still there. I don't have any tattoos but I hear you can't stop at one... Same happens with domain names. I've a bunch of them because I like their names and ever hoping to monetize them, like Datitla, or Titilos, born out of poetry; or Sorocabana, born out of nostalgia for gone Montevidean places, for example.
I said you sent me looking for my early outstanding footprint because I felt I needed to go back to my own genesis in the media, my own semi-abandoned relics, to reach the point of the present of your note and then project my mind into the future you see there. Some of those old posts look foreign, even to me. Some are political in nature (Bush's war, etc.). Some are interesting, like this one: http://www.sorocabana.net/cambios/2005/03/22/la_vida_sin_may/ Thanks to that retrospective I found that the lady mentioned there, Rebecca Milans, another fellow Uruguayan, was still writing in her blog until last year! Talk about a blast from the past! I haven't read her musings for well over ten years! I thought that just finding that was worthy of sharing all this with you. If you read a bit of her blog, especially her very early posts, you'll see why.
Well, just a long rant to point at a grain of sand (hers) in a giant beach of online writing out there. Some literary fortunes were made in those early days, when agents started scouting blogs for hardcopy publishing. The media is still evolving, as you point out. Writing is still at the same level of angst as ever. Apologies for the long wind...
Luis, nothing makes me happier than engagement such as yours.
Writing is one of the great psychic engines of our species, second only to music and cities. Like psychedelics and coding—with which it more than overlaps—writing is going nowhere, and through media like Twitter—which functionally alter how we write and, by extension, how we think and act—it has become as central to the everyday lives of many people as reading once was. If anything, writing is only now reaching the seamlessness of “water in water.”
Though too quickly consigned to the specialist’s shelf, the scrutiny of literary forms and of the history of writing yield exceptional epochal markers. They have also sped-up to the point of indiscernibility in the age of the Internet, which makes them rather difficult to study.
Even so, the current relationship between writing publishing and reading—the mutant troika—is among the most intriguing feedback loops we are immersed in.
And there is a very real sense in which everything I write is about writing. I very much enjoyed your autogenealogy above, and hope to slowly share mine in The Bride Stripped substack, which will be more personal than this one.
[You also made me miss Montevideo, which I hope to visit soon: it’s really been too long].
A last, and only seemingly gratuitous, note: so much can be inferred from anybody through their writing it’s shocking we do it in public at all. We really cannot help ourselves.
"A last, and only seemingly gratuitous, note: so much can be inferred from anybody through their writing it’s shocking we do it in public at all. We really cannot help ourselves."
No, we can't. That squishy machine in the osseous cavity will stop at nothing when properly prompted. Not for the benefit of any external body but for itself, lest the constant chatter will drive it mad. It is a release of sorts, like pulling a splinter, in most cases, or something orgasmic-like, when you hit the right chord and it resonates beyond ourselves. Yes, 90% of the time it exposes us like it exposes the long coated man on 5th Ave, flashing unsuspecting ladies, when in fact he's got shamefully little to "expose".
My only wish is that, whatever I'm able to infer with my occasional droppings, isn't too dreadful, like Kopi luwak beans...
I’m a fan of Kopi Luwak! Write on.