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Scenes from the Web's callow youth
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July 2, 1999 |
The film was mostly shot in 1996, when -- for many at least, including filmmaker Doug Block -- the Web was strange and unknown new terrain. Never mind that by then it had actually been in existence for a good half-decade, or that the Mosaic-Netscape browser had become wildly popular two years before, turning the Web into a mass phenomenon overnight. One of the aspects of the Web that "Home Page" nicely captures was its ability -- still fresh three years ago and now mostly lost -- to allow each new person who wandered its links to feel as though he was on a private journey of discovery. That, plainly, is how Block felt. A veteran documentary filmmaker, he looked out at the Web and was floored by the welter of personal storytelling it had unleashed. First he started looking for "cyberstars" (a word that New Yorker writer John Seabrook somehow was able to use with a straight face in 1996, when Block interviewed him) and found one in Justin Hall, then a Swarthmore undergraduate who'd built one of the Web's first links sites and online diaries. Then the filmmaker got bitten by the Web bug himself and decided to build his own Web site. Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology If "Home Page" has a focus, it's on Hall's peregrinations within and beyond the Web underground. With his hair up in an improbably high knot and his enthusiastic energy and word-rate ratcheted even higher, Hall embodies one vision of the Web circa 1996 -- as a kind of haven for funky eccentrics who spent their nights coding HTML and their days envisioning a digital utopia. At the same time that he is putting on a kind of "Justin Show" for Block's camera and pouring the intimate details of his daily life onto his Web site, Hall is also proselytizing for the Web, teaching people to build their own pages and encouraging them to use the new medium in a personal way. In hindsight, it looks like a culture clash waiting to happen -- one foreshadowed in "Home Page" via a funny clip showing Hall jabbering about the Web's wonders to a conference hall full of uncomprehending gray-haired news executives in suits. For the Web to truly become a mass medium, it needed to disassociate itself from the freaky imagery of an icon like Hall and make itself approachable and unthreatening -- which has largely happened since, with the profusion of portal strategies and filtering technologies. So in one sense "Home Page" seems to provide a straightforward time capsule from the Web's wild young pre-commercial days, before the Internet had become associated in the public mind with youthful millionaires, day trading and online auctions. It's an era that Roger Ebert, in a piece for Yahoo Internet Life on "Home Page," describes as a "lost paradise" -- but any attentive viewer of the documentary and its confused, lonely subjects can see just how far off that phrase is. In any case, the film's snapshots of the era, particularly for those who lived through it, have their Proustian-madeleine-like qualities: Here's the old HotWired offices, with the Suck cots in the corner! Here's a HotWired editor grinning, "We're going public soon!" Here's the launch of Howard Rheingold's doomed Electric Minds, with the staff gathered to chant in a circle!
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