BrockLi Soup

Around the end of my senior year, I registered for free web hosting. This wasn’t my first web site: a year or two prior, I had decided to make the biggest joke collection ever. Then I planned to expand it into an index of the Internet - like Yahoo!, but all mine.

Five years ago, these goals were realistic. At the time, the entire World Wide Web consisted of Yahoo!, AOL, and 46 home pages with distracting backgrounds and obnoxious animated graphics.

I started the site and dubbed it BrockHaven (this was right around the time I started calling myself Brock). I had never heard of a “weblog,” and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. It was, effectively, the first blog I’d ever seen, and lasted a full six posts (three times the average LiveJournal account).

I’ve gone looking for it now and then over the past several years, just to see if it was still up. Until a few months ago, it was. When I couldn’t get to it sometime during Winter quarter, I figured it was gone forever and lamented the fact that I’d never backed it up for nostalgia’s sake.

For some reason, I was inclined to look for it again today. It was back online, with the counter reset to 0. I saved all the pages, removed the banner ads the server added, and now, against my better judgment, I give you BrockHaven, the very first blog in the history of communication.

Please note that the “days till college” counter says I’ve been in college for 1,318 days now. This fact makes me feel older than I thought it would.

Earlier tonight, Ryan commented on literacy in this day and age. I’ve been meaning to address the overreaching “hot damn the Internet’s cool” issue for some time now - particularly how the current state of the Net has affected my every day life - but parts of it keep coming up and demanding their own consideration (see: Flickr, blog-friends, information collection, more Flickr, productivity, high class culture, etc).

At any rate, the ongoing blogsplosion (of course it’s a word) has contributed to the articulation of countless thousands that would have otherwise wasted four years of quality high school English by placing apostrophes before the ’s’ in plural words on fliers (this is one of my prime pet peeves). Were it not for the introduction of LiveJournal into my life three and a half years (and 1,907 posts) ago, my reasons for writing anything longer than a thank-you note would have ended with my last college essay. LiveJournal especially has opened the proverbial floodgate for the proverbial flood of proverbial idiots to spread their proverbial drivel.

Because, let’s face it. Most of the people writing in some kind of online journal are doing it to make their voice louder, to reach a wider audience, and to make themselves feel more important than they are (I know I am, anyway). For every legitimate, decent writer producing new content every day, there are 300 angst-ridden high school kids spouting illegible word-vomit on LiveJournal, and another twenty on the smaller (but notably angsty-er) DeadJournal. The unfortunate truth surrounding both of these sites is that they are largely populated by people whose concept of grammar is heavily influenced by shorthand AOL speak.

I couldn’t be happier that more people have a reason to write on a regular basis, myself included. I enjoy having a reason to write, and there are a lot of blogs out there that I enjoy reading. However, I can’t help but think we may have taken a step backward when we took monkeys off the Shakespeare project and replaced their typewriters with computers.

Also, thanks to Ryan for pointing out that I’m interesting.