This site is a necessary evil.
The web is a funny medium. Even now, as corporate interests dominate the web and try to squeeze out individuals running their own sites, it has never been so easy to self-publish. This democratization is often heralded as one of the traits of a truly world-changing invention. Much as the arrival of the printing press made books cheap enough for the general populace to have books—thus making it valuable to them to be literate—the ability for the Average Joe to publish his own content and make it available to just about anyone means that every voice can be heard. Whether you are a mega-corporation attempting to influence public opinion with a major ad campaign, or a little guy trying to tell the world about a little thing, seldom has the ability to reach listeners been so equal.
And yet as a side effect of reducing the cost of publishing to the point where ordinary citizens can once again participate, we have lowered the bar on what is material worthy of publishing. When it costs real money to print a book, publishers will not invest that money unless they are reasonably certain they can recoup their investment, and they can’t do that unless they can actually sell what is being printed. Many things which nobody cares about will thus remain unpublished, and this is often a good thing.
At the top of the category of things most people do not care about are egosites, sites dedicated to the glorification of a single individual. I mean, what kind of egotistical freak puts up a fan site dedicated to themselves? Are they so taken with themselves that they assume everyone else would just love the chance to get to know them? Consider the time taken to build these sites. That’s a huge investment of time for something that probably not even their own parents will bother to look at. (Even if their parents know how to use the web, which for some of them isn’t the case.)
The irony of me, holding these views, putting up a web site entirely for self-promotion is not lost upon me, I can assure you. I thought long and hard about whether to do this site. The clincher for me came when I realized I really needed to have a decent online résumé. I could have put the résumé up on the site I’ve been running for years—fractalus.com—but that site is dedicated to the promotion of fractal art, and I did not want to “pollute” it with such shameless self-aggrandizement. I also wanted a place to put some of the projects I was working on that weren’t necessarily fractal-centered, and even a place I could put some photos for some of my friends. Eventually I had enough justification for a truly personal web site, enough things to persuade me it was a “necessary evil”. So I built it, and here you are.
Remaking Myself
Yet I wonder why exactly I felt motivated to do such a site. Am I really that narcissistic? Am I my favorite person? The web allows me to write what I want, whether or not anyone in the general public ever reads it. Nobody checks my writing to make sure it’s popular (this is good) but nobody checks it to make sure it’s accurate, either (this is bad). I could make inadvertent errors or even intentional errors.
Worse yet, I could portray myself as a completely different person than I really am. Of all the egosites you may have visited, for how many of them were you able to tell whether the site’s subject was accurately depicted? You have no other authority than the site itself, usually, and that is scant authority at all. How do you know I’m who I seem to be?
In this way egosites on the web are almost completely post-modern. The creator of the site can remake themselves daily. I would say that many weblogs unabashedly do this; their purpose is to share with their audience part of their voyage of self-discovery, their shifting moods and ideas. And while many sites keep archives of previously-published material, so at least you can go back and look at how the author has changed, this is not always the case. Sometimes a personal site simply changes over time. The web is such a dynamic medium, when you return to a site you’ve visited previously, it’s not always clear when content has been altered.
Would that I could claim to be above such petty meddling and pretending, but the truth is that when this site was merely a sub-section of another site, it was rebuilt several times. No matter how much I try to resist this post-modern culture that engulfs me, it exerts influence, and I cannot always resist the temptation to redefine myself, to change who I say I am to fit the needs or whims of the moment.
I am just like those I would accuse and deride. To assuage my conscience, I write this piece, rather than avoid building the site. To keep from being too serious about myself, I poke fun at the entire egosite concept, while making the site bigger. I give myself a soapbox for airing my opinions, while suggesting those opinions really aren’t worth that much. But you know I don’t believe that too strongly, else I wouldn’t have bothered to write out the opinions in the first place.
Perhaps the act of writing—even if it remains unread by all but three people—is a sort of therapy. By writing things here, I can feel like I’ve said my piece, that I’ve been heard, and thus the rest of my friends—who must endure my presence daily—will no longer be burdened by endless streams of opinionated rhetoric. Instead, I will subject you, dear reader, to my ranting, on a site dedicated to the wonderfulness that is me, and be unashamed.
Welcome to my corner of the web.
