Geocities, and snippets of personal internet history
So, Yahoo is shuttering Geocities. Like many people, my first reaction when I heard this news was, “Geocities is still around?” I hadn’t thought about it in years, other than to make a passing reference when proclaiming how much a sucky web site sucks (“that’s like a bad Geocities web site circa 1996!”) And in fact, several years ago as a joke, Cari made a blog them called “Bad Geocities Web Site Circa 1996.”
My second reaction was a pang of nostalgia, because I hadn’t thought about Geocities as anything but a joke in so long, and now I was remembering what it was, and where I was, when I first opened an account there. And suddenly I was really wishing I could remember my Geocities URL.
I know it was in Athens. But I can’t remember the random 4-digit number after the slash. I’ve tried every conceivable way of searching for it… nothing. The crappy thing about The Wayback Machine is you have to know the URL. I wish there was a way to search The Wayback Machine based on keywords, site name, etc.
What Maria Diaz said in her post about Geocities really rang true to me:
What this ending of Geocities does make me realize is, for all our scary talk of how we need to watch what our slutty, drunken selves put online because oh no someone who may pay us to do something might see it, is how not permanent so much of the web truly is. This is why I think talking about the Internet’s history is so important. So much of what happened is gone now. We have to discuss it, there’s so little evidence of it but our memories and a few pages with dead links.
While my mid to late 90s internet presence might be embarrassing in some ways, it’s part of who I am, and it played a profound role in shaping who I would become. And personally, I’m past thinking it’s embarrassing; distance helps with that. (Although, geez, did I really email Flagpole w/ a “From” line that said “Mr. Evil Breakfast?” I did – and hey, they let me do my senior project there anyway!) I’ve joked about red Times New Roman text on a violent green* background, angsty poetry, the <blink> tag, and a CGI form where “nerds” could solicit sexual banter. But I don’t want that stuff to be lost forever, because to pretend it never existed feels dishonest and sad.
A Google search for “Amber Luis” turns up a link to my high school alumni page (and a bunch of other people named Amber Luis), but other than that, as far as Google is concerned I never had an online presence under that name. And as much as I’ve wanted to shun that name and tuck it away in a closet where I never have to look at it again, I know I shouldn’t/can’t do that completely.
One problem is, as I was telling Rusty the other night, that those of us who were the early girls on the web (although I never really thought of myself as one of those, because it seemed like a cool kids club; I wasn’t making zines or running a webcam or anything) didn’t know we should be documenting and preserving this stuff. It was just daily life – as is any part of daily life, which you don’t appreciate as valuable until years later, but how could you have had the foresight? More recently, I cursed the stylesheets that are gone forever before I made backups of all my previous blog designs. It’s why I can’t bring myself to throw out my stack of old wall calendars and address books. I had sense enough to preserve the SimpleText-based journal I kept in 9th and 10th grade (I printed it out and put it in a binder), but somehow that was more concrete in my mind, whereas the online stuff was… I don’t know, something else. I had no frame of reference.
A few years ago, I searched The Wayback Machine for all my old URLs that I could remember (GeoCities not among them, nor Tripod). The oldest version of my site that I have is from April 1997. This was after I’d already moved to Galena, a 386 running Linux that was the web server for Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, where my friends Tom and Gabe were students. They got extra credit for running the server – and it’s not like anyone else had the time, knowledge, or inclination to do it! They made me an account on Galena and I thereby graduated to a real server, not one of those free hosting services. And by then, at least I was using a black background instead of green.
Senior year of high school, some friends and I “crashed” this girl’s birthday party (stupid, and another story altogether) – but nobody cared whether or not we had been invited anyway, and in fact I don’t think anyone knew we hadn’t been invited. At one point, her mom gave me a withering look, hands on hips, and said, “You have a web site, don’t you?” She said “web site” the way you might say “yeast infection.” I wanted to shrink into the floor. Clearly she had read the bit about me almost getting caught having sex in a car. Or maybe simply having a web site was offense enough.
In the days before blogs, I kept a running narrative of sorts, by updating my homepage semi-frequently. Example from April 1998:
It’s tax day, folks. Whatever… for me, it’s a day of sitting home being disgustingly sick and agonizing over my term paper, which is due in two days. We have only three more weeks of school left – really, what’s the point? [Sniff] Anyway, updates on my life: I just returned from a ten-day jaunt around Europe – France and Barcelona, to be exact. It was a lot of fun, though hectic at times. I would put pictures up here if my scanner weren’t broken.
Yes, pink text. Ho hum. And I have to laugh at the way I make my life sound so cosmopolitan – a “jaunt around Europe.” Oh give me a break! Even then I knew we could spin things how we want online, show people only the parts we want them to see.
As for my design skills, they didn’t get much better after I went off to college. In fact, I had more animated gifs in December 1998 than on any previous incarnation. Eventually I gave up trying to pretend I was a designer at all. At least I never made stupid embossed buttons in Corel Draw.
But let’s go back a few steps.
Before I had a web site (or “homepage,” to use the parlance of the times), I had an AOL account and spent a lot of time hanging out on the R.E.M. message boards and chat room (which was called Catbutt). These were my people! People who understood! I got in trouble one month for running up a huge bill – AOL still charged by the hour at the time. My parents were not pleased, and I had to take it down a few notches.
I have a Polaroid picture of me and an online friend from those message boards. She had come to Athens (which might as well have been Mecca for those folks) to visit another board member, and drove to Augusta to meet me. I need to find that picture and scan it. She was the first online friend I met “IRL.” I had to meet her when my parents weren’t home, because I knew they would not approve. They didn’t know much about the internet, only that it was probably full of freaks.
I still have a necklace and a little trinket box another online friend sent me in the mail. We originally met on the same R.E.M. message boards but eventually started just emailing each other. We’d chronicle our days to each other in long, drawn-out emails. Her username was Yttria; she lived in the Chicago area. I felt like we had such a bond. I thought she was so cool, and was thrilled that she seemed to think I was cool, too (and secretly I worried that she wouldn’t think that if she knew me IRL). I wonder what ever happened to her? Google knows only about the transition metal in the singular form.
In a private chat room (remember how you could make those on AOL?), I had something not unlike cybersex w/ another message board member. Later when I saw a picture of him (dressed as Mike Mills for Halloween), I was disappointed, because he was not nearly as hot as the mental image I’d had of him. I didn’t feel too bad, though; the experience had still been fun. And at least I understood that expectations do not always mirror reality (as I relearned several times when attempting to snag someone for sex IRL via AOL).
-Just now, linked from my April 1998 site version, I found this piece of writing:
Introduction to an Autobiography
by Amber LuisI didn’t know what it was that I was waiting for out there in the rain; all I knew was that I was indeed waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting – I had been waiting for over an hour. I had been waiting my whole life. For what? I shivered and drew my knees up to my chest, hugging them. I watched an ant scurry around on the pavement, dancing precariously on the line between wet and dry. Fat rain drops fell from the rusty overhang that sheltered me. I mused momentarily on the fact that a homeless person would probably resent me – corduroys, long-sleeved shirt, nice thick boots, a shower earlier today, and I chose to be out in the rain. In a way I disgusted myself. “So artistic, so bohemian; what, do you think your life’s a movie? Do you think you’re on Candid Camera?” –That’s what my mind muttered, heavy with contempt. Sure, it would have been easy enough for me to just stand up and walk back into the cafe and order a nice hot mocha, but something in me couldn’t bear to go back in there with the fluorescent lights, the soft Muzak, the quiet buzz of friendly conversation. Instead I was out here, waiting, waiting. I only wished I knew for what. Waiting for someone to save me, I guess, but knowing that no one would show. Too scared to let that someone be me.
I had completely forgotten about that. And yes, it drips of teen angst – but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant or just vapid melodrama. An outsider might think that, but they don’t know what I know; they haven’t lived my life. Reading it, I remember that night perfectly. I was sitting outside Barnes and Noble (one of my only “safe spaces” so to speak) and there was shit going on. I remember it perfectly. I didn’t know how to write about it any other way than what I knew at the time.
This is why we need to preserve these records of ours lives, however embarrassing they might be – because they help us remember the things we didn’t know we forgot. And if you’ve ever heard me ramble about my worries about the impermanence of digital media, well, this is why.
I can’t remember my Geocities URL, so that part of my life is lost to the ether. I hope we won’t keep making the same mistakes – but I also don’t know how to truly prevent it.
* Catch the reference? It’s one I would have made in 1996. I loved obscure references, and things that are amusing only to me, then as much as I do now. Some things don’t change!
Ha! I was Aegean/Athens/whatever number like 3299 or something like that. I remember it was very dark and fantasy filled. Oh your old website brings back memories of Augusta, and your room, and B&N.
[...] Amber and Garrett had discussed writing similar posts a few days ago. Amber has since published a post.I’m going for an executive summary here and will probably miss a few important items, but if [...]
Also re: The Wayback Machine, it doesn’t quite go wayback enough for my purposes. Most of my early websites I made at UT are lost to the ether.
Great post. I’m not as focused on saving everything as you are, but I did recreate most of my old geocities pages and stick them in my old blog. I also put in a version of my first website (just space that was provided by my old ISP in the mid-90s) that I had preserved through printing it out.
Good memories, but it’s sometimes painful to read the things I wrote.
Funny side-item: I used to post to a lot of BBS message boards. I thought it was “distinctive” to post so that my sentences alternated bright magenta and cyan. That, in conjunction with the fact that I “knew” everything, must have equaled one really annoying teenager.
My pet peeve during the mid/late-90s was the “Under Construction” gifs people would put on their pages. I would say, “Um – a webpage is always under construction!”
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Ha! I was online w/ Prodigy when it was the New Hotness. I don’t remember what year that was? Had to be early 90’s per wikipedia. I don’t even remember what I did with it. Read news groups? I certainly remember feeling cool for having the internet. I think it came with some Encyclopedia on CD, but I can’t remember which one. At some point we got AOL, and I discovered IRC. Oh, IRC. Shenanigans, they ensued. I would write my own post about this but it would kind of be an endless string of IRC -induced drama.
Great post. I need to do one of these myself.
Have you seen DreamHost’s “History of WebRings”?
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history/
[...] night, I started another “personal internet history” post. I’m happy with my first one, which I wrote after hearing about GeoCities’ impending shutdown; but I want to do another [...]