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R E C E N T L Y

Masticated morsels from the media monde
By Susan Lehman
Howell rains on Clinton's parade; Salman rocks the fatwa; a Rose by any other network
(10/08/98)

Cinema falsité
By James Poniewozik
One of the great myths surrounding the videotape of Clinton's testimony is that it represented raw, unfiltered experience
(09/30/98)

Big game
By David Bowman
CNN stalks Thomas Pynchon
(09/22/98)

The jester of Monicagate
By Inda Schaenen
As the president falls, Lucianne Goldberg's son rises
(09/18/98)

Gentrification X
By James Poniewozik
Far from the ejaculating masses: The New York Times Style section hails Wallpaper magazine, a style mag for monied hipsters
(09/16/98)

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BROWSE THE
UNDER THE COVERS
ARCHIVE

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

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For legitimacy and profit, Web sites are turning themselves
-----------------into books. So is there any Web writing left on the Web?
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BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

In the past year or so, a horrible thing has happened to Web writers. People started reading them.

At some point after the selfless bequests of Sts. Diana and Monica, the Web changed from a cultural phenomenon to a news outlet; and online publishers, having realized they were no longer publishing merely to an audience of college computing-center managers and disgruntled temps, started trying to push their popularity to the next level (that of finally making a buck) by appealing to a broader public.

Their strategies? Generally, they boil down to aping the same print media that webpreneurs once boasted about replacing. So it is that in the past two weeks Time Inc.'s Netly News -- launched in 1995 as a corporate knockoff of Suck -- has been refocused as the more staid, mass-market-oriented "Time Digital Daily," and Time's counterweight Newsweek has finally established its own browser-bustin' Web presence. So it is that Salon is offering more hard news (viz. the Hyde the Salami imbroglio and the ensuing thousands of new page views) and less commentary. And so it is, above all, that Web mags are anthologizing themselves in book form with a vengeance, thus Web sites may finally turn profits not by supplanting old media, but by failing to.

In retrospect, the offline-ization of the Web was predictable: For all the talk about pioneering a new medium, there's never been any better way to flatter webpreneurs than to say they oughtta be in print. But while all this may put us one step closer to profitability, it may also mean the end of any slim chance that writing on the Web might be something different from writing offline.

Was there ever any such thing as "Web writing," as opposed to writing that just happened to be published online? Yes -- sort of. As a highly hyped yet widely unread medium, the Web originally allowed for stylistic experimentation and outside voices, on both private zines and online magazines. The period from '94 to '96 or '97 -- before webzines were plugged on news-chat shows and treated as important adjuncts to newspapers and TV networks -- saw a relatively democratic division of attention between pros and amateurs. One beneficiary of that window of opportunity, Daniel Drennan, has just released a book -- "The New York Diaries" (Ballantine) -- that throws the Webs of '96 and '98 into sharp contrast.

Drennan is the drop-dead hilarious essayist who won a cult following (and exposure in Harper's and on NPR) in the mid-'90s for publishing his frenetic, run-on rants about Manhattan life and "Beverly Hills 90210" at his site Inquisitor. The irony of "Diaries" appearing now is that, while it meshes perfectly with 1998's commercial acceptance of webiana, it's really a touchingly nostalgic blast from the Web's past. Drennan's frenetic style, filled with glorious pile-ups of nested clauses -- he's the reason adjectives like breathless were invented -- is genuine 1995-96-era Web:

It is over this treacherous trail (the Williamsburg Bridge) that I commute to work -- via a bicycle that I buy at a police auction and that I imagine to be haunted by the messenger most likely run down while riding it, based on its beat-up condition. The trip is not eased by the huge sections of the walkway that are completely warped and uneven if not missing altogether; those cyclists in racing shorts and helmets tearing up the bridle path in Central Park on their thousand-dollar bikes and getting an adrenaline rush out of charging over molehill-sized mounds of wood chips at negligible speed have absolutely nothing at all on me, helmetless and maneuvering my way among the bridge's missing steel plates, looking down through the breaks in the walkway to the latticelike metal-grating road below, through which I can see straight down to the river flowing hundreds of feet underneath me, leaving me shaken up mentally as well as physically before my work day has even begun.

Whew! (and keep in mind, this stuff has been past an editor at this point).

Critics who speculated on whether the Web would produce a new, discrete style of writing usually focused on hypertext and multimedia, neither of which has improved much on good old dictatorial linear prose yet. To me, though, what set apart the Web as a medium was simply that it was cheap and endless. The delightful, willful, wasteful excess that Drennan specializes in -- check out that "absolutely nothing at all" -- embodies a writer's wild excitement at the challenge of filling a bottomless notebook.

Can this sort of writing, in less capable hands, come off self-indulgent, exhausting, hostile to the reader? Sure. Web publishers now will tell you that no one wants to read more than bite-sized pieces online, and the masses may bear that out; certainly that belief has boosted the popularity of features like the info-nuggets offered at Slate. But much of the most distinctive Web writing has been just the opposite -- expansive, anal-expulsive, Rabelaisian dump-truckloads of verbiage, like Drennan's "90210" roundups (happily still available online), which would never fly at the well-planned webzine venture of the late-'90s.

Closer to the spirit of '98 in Web writing is the sleek, eponymous anthology from Nerve (Broadway). From the get-go, this classy erotica site has been anxious to present itself as "literate smut." And indeed, if there's any problem with this generously sampled collection, it's that it's too good, too well-made, professional and bookish. One wonders whether the site, which just went online last summer, wasn't intended from the start to become a book -- and whether its biblio-friendly, highbrow intentions kept it a little safer (in style if not content) than it could have been. Many of Nerve's contributions are "experimental" in the accomplished, anthology-approved ways that we're used to from the William Vollmanns, Catherine Texiers and Dale Pecks who fill the book, not in the too-much-too-fast way of authors like Drennan.

That's not at all bad -- it's hard to argue against seamless, lucid, insightful writing -- it's just not at all different; so it doesn't say much for the potential of the Web to produce new, sui generis forms of writing.

Which is not to say everyone's given up on Web writing as a distinct genre. Last week, Word, the vaunted Web journal of personal essays and esoterica, was resurrected by a new owner, after a suspension of publication last spring that was widely interpreted as the canary in the URLmine for content online. But the trends may be against Word and similar sites like the fray. They and the Drennans of the world will likely get proportionately less attention as the Web nears the big time and other Web outlets increasingly mimic the print media.

Writers plying the Web in, say, 1995 shared the excitement of knowing that theoretically, millions of people were reading; and the freedom of knowing that, actually, millions of people weren't. In 1998, we know that millions, thousands, anyway, just might read us, maybe even pay us -- or somebody else. Which forces us to play it safer, to give you what you've proved you'll pay for. Less rambling and more simple declaratives. Less mouthing off and more news you can use. And that is probably an improvement by almost any standard measure. Web writing as I've known it deserves every nasty adjective critics have thrown at it: snotty, solipsistic, overdone, excessive, insular, contemptuous, undisciplined, childish, navel-gazing and elitist.

And I'll miss it when it's gone.
SALON | Oct. 13, 1998