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In "Life Less Frightening", punk rock band Rise Against makes a blanket statement that the world is a very frightening place. Inside my own small hub in the vast expanse of the internet, I share these sentiments. As I look at all these websites, shoddily built, shoddily obtained, I feel as if it's all meaningless. Where did we all go wrong? When did the website mutate from a badge of courage to a trinket that can be thrown away as easily as the next? Did sites like Geocities or Freewebs start the rapid degradation of the personal website, or was it Livejournal? What kind of culture breeds MySpace pages that make you want to stab your eyes out in a passionate anti-culture fury? Why has it gotten to the point where anybody can have a personal website, and feel as if it's nothing to be proud of? Shouldn't it strike someone as frightening that virtually nothing phases us anymore? I take a lot of pride in my website…but seeing this "new" era of website hosting and building scares me. And as Rise Against says… I don't ask for much…truth be told, I'd settle for a life less frightening. The history of the personal website can't be tracked conclusively. There are thousands of personal website creation tools, web hosts, and assorted accessories that have come and gone throughout the years. The history of the personal website lives and dies with the personal website itself. But is that future in jeopardy? Are we becoming so impersonal with our personal websites…that they are no longer personal at all? Has corporate America sucked the soul out of yet another beast? Has the untamed been castrated? In a word…yes. It all started so simply. Geocities. Freewebs. Basic website creation tools for those skilled enough to learn just a bit about HTML. It was a personal revelation…no longer did you have to be a website builder to actually build a website! The prospect of "websites for the masses, not the classes" was ushered in with the early years of personal websites: the Geocities, the Freewebs, the Tripods. But at least these few asked something of their subscribers. The creation tools were streamlined, but required a certain mastery to really produce something special. I personally honed a lot of my website creation skills in Geocities and Tripod. I toiled through the "Bandwidth Exceeded" limit of Geocities. I organized file after file into neat sections to cope with Tripod's bare-bones approach to actual file organization. In short, Geocities and Tripod and the like were good tools, though flawed, but at least they made you work to earn your reward. And then, it all proverbially hit the fan. MySpace. Like a black plague, MySpace has spread its infection to where hardly anyone is left in calm unknowing. The effect of MySpace has been nothing short of astronomical- everybody uses MySpace. Jaded critics use MySpace. Your friends use MySpace. Film companies use MySpace! Some film companies have decided to only promote their film through MySpace. Does anyone realize what that means? What does it say about us when a multi-million dollar company would rather make a fictional MySpace for a fictional movie than actually advertise their product? It wouldn't be so bad if those with a MySpace actually earned that right. But the creators of MySpace chose to make the personal website available to any and everybody…like a Pandora's Box, MySpace has been unleashed and captured the minds and souls of people around the world. With a few simple clicks, you could put anything onto your MySpace…pictures, sounds, movies, a guestbook, facts about yourself. Who cares if it stretches out the page and has the most god-awful colors known to man, right? It's all about personalizing something that should have never been yours to begin with. Now, who am I to talk, correct? I'm a web designer. I'm one of the few that are really left. In a world where "Web Designers" are people who take college classes and get paid millions of dollars to leech ideas off of each other, where are the few that still think it's an art? More importantly, what happened to all those who enjoyed earning the right to have a website? I've spent more than five years perfecting my skills as a website manager. I have personally gotten to the point where I could basically look at any website on the internet and dissect it, line by line, in terms of HTML code. The thing that makes the internet run? It's like second nature to me. So, am I the jaded veteran? Do I hate the fact that I had to earn my badge of courage while it takes others five minutes? On the contrary, I enjoyed every late night spent at honing my craft. In truth, that is my main point of rebellion at sites like MySpace- they deprive you of an experience that can only enrich your life. To truly value something, to truly understand it…you have to slave over it, face losses with it, struggle with it until you get it right. When designing my personal website, I would encounter countless errors, and I would go line by line to discover the small little bit that went wrong. Sometimes, it was as miniscule as an unclosed or misplaced line of code. Other times it was a big problem that needed nearly a complete retooling. And still other times, I had no idea what was wrong, and only figured out what was wrong after hours and hours of trial and error. To the MySpace guru, this seems like a frivolous lesson in boredom and unneeded perfectionism. Yet I learned a lot through website building. I learned that perfectionism, at its root, is a thing of bliss when achieved. If you put your entire being into a project, and it comes out spectacular in the end, why not take pride in it? That's what we're missing in our current dark era of website creation…the personal website is impersonal! How can we have a "personal" website, when we use code generated by others, images generated by others, videos generated by others?! We are not ourselves in places like MySpace…we are simply a vague imitation. We are what they tell us to be. We have entered an age where having a website means having no website at all…it means using someone else's technology and slapping your face on it. Some would say it was inevitable, some would argue against this. But the face of blind, robotic corporate America is reflected in "personal" website creations like MySpace moreso than anything else in popular culture, no matter how many "friends" you have there or how many hits your "blog" gets. If people could just learn to appreciate what it means to really work for a website, maybe they would begin to understand why I take so much pride in having a website that I personally created. I have a website that has never existed before, not until I created it. In a sea of blandness that threatens to drown us all, I am unique. But for how long? How long will it be before even the most jaded critic becomes enraptured with a new feature? How long will my personal rebellion last? Will it last until I find out that it's the only way to communicate with my friends? Will my strength and trust in my own personal website last as it becomes less and less of a "personal" website and becomes exposed to more and more people? How long will it be until their ad's come true…how long will it be until everyone really does have a MySpace? There are more questions than answers in regards to the future of the personal website. Maybe people who have no experience will finally take some time to learn a thing or two about HTML. Or maybe they'll keep content with being spoon-fed all their tools, like happy brainless children. Maybe uniqueness really is dead…maybe soon we'll all be lost in the big gray matter as the "personal" website becomes nothing more than an extension of the personal façade rather than the person inside. Maybe there really is no point to this paper, at all. Maybe it's already happened. In that case, I submit this paper as a testament to what once was, and what may never be again. So, the next time you browse MySpace, you think of what it produces. Think of the moronic teenage websites that assault your senses, and picture what these kids would have been like if they had actually had to struggle to earn their precious website. Do I want them to slave over a computer? Again, that's not my intention. But more and more I feel as if this paper will be used as a history lesson…as if children somewhere will snicker and laugh at the fact that someone actually put thought and feeling into their website. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. All I know is that the future of the personal website scares me. The choice to make a personal website, with emphasis on the "personal", may no longer be a choice. Maybe it's a war. A war that only exists in bits of data and lines of code. Maybe it's a war inside our heads…and our hearts. And as Rise Against says…
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