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A Glass World By Maria Ercilia From "Mundo Digital," in "Folha de Sao Paulo" (Brazil) Translated by Viviane Vaz de Menezes (vvaz@hotnet.net) Original URL: http://www.uol.com.br/internet/netvox/nvox0707.htm

Early '94, the web was a small old town, but involved the whole world. You met people from many places, but they were always the same half-dozen. At IRC it was always the same 5 or 6 Brazilians, at the "What's New" of NCSA (where we would get to know the new sites) there were only few addresses each week. I was already a bit addicted to the Internet, really without a reason why, since there wasn't all that much to see. Let's say it was an addiction searching for a drug... That's when I found Justin Hall's site, a boy with an Web journal for years. I've gone crazy. What was that, that guy aparently normal, telling all his life to strangers. Really everything. Drunkenness, general ramblings, sex, Justin's naked picture. I started reading that page, as if to understand what draws a person to make his life a truly open book. Narcisism? Vanity? A truly need of expressing himself? I haven't got to a conclusion, but I realized a good journaler never ends up with no readers - I started to follow Justin's life as someone would follows a soap opera. He travelled to Honduras, came back, had his hair cut, got a girl, got another... Later I found other journalers, some really boring. Other simply talented. Some make a mix of confessions, pictures, etc., others only disconnected annotations. Between these, Carl Steadman became one of my favorites. Much more cynical than Justin, Carl has an evasive and sharp style. Julie Petersen falls into a freak techno-idealism. Time has passed, the web has grown, I forgot a bit about the journalers. I had an impression they were just a phenomena at the beggining of the Internet, that they would end up tired and would disappear. Not really. Last week there was inaugurated a site made by journalers, Metajournals. The journalers not only haven't died, they are very organized. Metajournals reunites thousand sites/journals and articles about them. It's truly a world apart, made of people that transformed life into Web pages. Never found a Brazilian journaler. Also a part of Metajournals are some sites of confessional fiction, as The Fray and AfterDinner. They are relatives of the journals, but more elaborate and finished. The journalers on the Web project their identity on a scale that would be unattainable otherwise. Maybe they are, in a certain way, answering to a world less needing of geographical localization - it is not enough to them anymore letting people know where they live. They want to "exist," be visible, at places they will never be physically. Walter Benjamin wrote in 29: "Everything that is to come can be found under the transparency's flag." He talked about the architecture, foreseeing that the modern world would diminish privacy. The Web is a space for socialization, like the Paris commented by Benjamin. There the public and the private mix with each other more than ever and the transparency is total. It would be easy to discard the journalers as sick exhibitionists -- though there are some between them. But others are excellent writers. On the Web the public and the private mix more than ever, and the potential transparency is huge. The journalers experience a peak of transparency and exposition, like they were abolishing any frontiers with the world. Alexis Massie, who keeps the AfterDinner's site, says: "Don't know if what I'm doing is good. I know that a hundred people, every day, ask me what happened yesterday, and they are really interested. This is something many people have never experienced." Article copyright 1998 Folha de S. Paulo Syndicate, reprinted (in English) by Diarist.Net by permission.