A friend of mine hates the Web. He is "sick to death of everyone's obsession with having their own home page". Happily, he refers to himself as a "Philistine" when it comes to this medium, and he apologizes to me if I'm offended by his opinion.

I'm not offended at all. There is a graffiti quality to the personal pages on the Web, and not all of us are Keith Harrings. The way I see it, the Web is an endless blank wall upon which we're all trying to spray our egos. Whether it's a doctoral thesis, a resumé, or a grungy picture of some vacant-eyed bimbo's naked butt, this is all a plea to "look at me", "listen to me" and "acknowledge me". The novelty of the medium is stonger than its content, and until this changes, the Web will continue to be a seemingly endless collection of personalities reaching out to you in the hope that you will simply look, read, and heed. Remember "Tommy"? His cry of "See me, feel me, touch me" could very well be the torch song of the Web author.

Some years ago, I had dinner at a very informal restaurant in Soho in New York City. In the men's room, one entire wall (the one behind the urinals, to be honest) was covered with black slate, and there was a tray of chalk available for anyone to add his own scrawls to the wall if he desired. Well, there wasn't a square inch of that wall that wasn't covered with writing. The content ranged from typical toilet-stall idiocy ("for a good time....", etc.) to some rather profound musings about the state of the world. It all made for some very interesting browsing. The idea that people would read whatever you wrote was a very compelling reason to add your two cents to that cluttered wall. They didn't have to buy anything, or admit that they were reading it, or respond to it, or identify themselves. It was a purely voluntary, anonymous exchange of commentary. This is how I view the essence of personal pages on the Web.

No one demands that the people who create personal web pages should do so. And no one demands that you, as a browser, must look at or read what they've created. What you're reading at this moment is a personal and somewhat intimate one-sided speech, minus the milkbox. No one told me to write this, and I'm not forcing you to read it. By writing it, I feel that I'm able to reach out to people, even if they're strangers whom I'll never meet personally, and share my self. Yes, there's a good deal of ego involved. As my graduate school mentor once told me, ego is as much a tool of the writer as his pen (we didn't use word-processors back then). I suppose it's all this egomania, then, that my friend can't tolerate. Who wants to spend time reading the writing on the walls? Apparently he doesn't, and we do. Different strokes....

Obviously, I didn't address the purely informational and commercial aspects of the web here; I'll get to that in a future volume.

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