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Scenes from the Web's callow youth | page 1, 2
"Home Page" doesn't help you understand, for instance, how Justin Hall became a cyberstar in the first place. His "Links From the Underground" page provided, among many other things, one of the Web's first directories of sex-related sites (a function that Hall later de-emphasized). His autobiographical pages may have been the more innovative part of his site, but those sex links were what drew the traffic. In a similar example of lack of context, "Home Page" contains several behind-the-scenes looks at the launch of Electric Minds, without once telling viewers what the site was -- an experiment in mixing up online community discussion with original content. From Block's perspective, the most important fact about the Web is that, for some people, it has blurred the line between public and private and provided a chance to present personal stories to a potentially wide audience. That's significant enough, but it's not exactly unique to the Web; the autobiographical impulse was motivating authors and performance artists and filmmakers long before the term "home page" ever entered the vernacular. Block has written that the film is ultimately about a "search for intimacy" -- but most of what's on display is people making pretty conventional messes of their private lives, and using the Web to do so in mildly innovative ways. Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology In any case, personal storytelling is only one part of what makes the Web exciting -- and in concentrating on it, "Home Page" neglects the entire realm of what we call, for lack of a better word, "interactivity." For every Web-page creator obsessed with telling his own tale to the world, there are hundreds or thousands of Net users who just want to hook up with other people and talk. Web-based community may have been in a more primitive state back in "Home Page's" 1996, but if the movie were your only source you'd never know it existed at all. Ironically for a film about personal storytelling, "Home Page" is at its most awkward and unsatisfying in Block's attempts to turn the camera on himself and a midlife crisis that is alluded to but never fully limned. Shooting interviews with his wife and scenes with his young daughter, the filmmaker plainly feels he's exploring the concept of "home" in the digital era. He's on some kind of journey himself, I guess, but he doesn't clue us in much on where it's from or where it's headed. For that, you'd have to turn to Block's own Web site and online diary, which he started during the making of "Home Page" and continues to update. They provide at least some of the self-explanation and -examination that the film only hints at. In a similar way, if you really want to get to know Justin Hall, you'll learn far more by spending two hours browsing his voluminous online autobiography than watching "Home Page." It may simply be that film is not a very good medium for capturing the essence of the Web, its history and its innovators. If you want to know what a few celebrated home page builders in 1996 looked like, how they dressed or what they sounded like, "Home Page" may be diverting. But if you want to know what drove them and what they did and thought and where it led, you'll do a lot better just following their links.
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