Sometimes the tie-in is obvious
It was on this date, thirty years ago, on a server of the School of Education of Tel Aviv University that The Boidem, a long-running web-based column, appeared for the first time. From its inception it bore the byline "an occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday life", and though the adjective "occasional" appeared on each main column page, the column itself strove for consistency, and for its first twenty years on the whole succeeded in appearing monthly..
Though the date tie-in for each of the July columns (accessed via a not very prominent asterisk) occasionally fell on what would be considered The Boidem's birthday, these dates generally weren't celebrated as birthdays. On the other hand, they also didn't avoid them. It certainly wasn't purposeful that the column that appeared on the first birthday dealt with death, or at least how we might mourn on the internet. Interestingly, though perhaps also predictably, the date tie-in for that first birthday column almost prevented this final column from getting posted.
The second anniversary edition of The Boidem was posted on July 23 rather than on the 22nd (and noted that the Boidem had reached the two year mark). It was a favorite of mine. It purposefully played with the idea that the spiraling out linked pages were more significant than the main text - an idea that was examined a number of times in the columns. For me, at least, it was a good example of the tangential hypertext that became characteristic of these columns, even if after rereading it I think it lacks development.
Considering that the July 2001 column, that appeared on July 22, was similarly a column with relatively little main page and lots of tangential pages, maybe back then as well I felt that lack of development and tried to rectify it in another birthday column. But that column commemorating, if not fully celebrating, five years of The Boidem, also contained something of a premonition. I noted there that numerous web projects seem to exhaust themselves after five years. And then, in one of the column's inner pages I asked:
Is this a birthday celebration or a swan-song farewell?
Interestingly, that column's date tie-in raised an additional premonition. The date I'd chosen to commemorate was the generally accepted date for when the Pied Piper of Hamlin led the rats out of the city. In a comment I thought was exaggerated then (and still do today) I gave voice to one of today's greatest fears:
Like the Pied Piper, the internet delivered a desirable service, but suddenly we discover that it's stealing our children.
As if that wasn't enough to turn that celebration into a downer, I also wrote about what I saw happening to the web, and even back then it wasn't pretty. I wrote:
today the associative web has been replaced by the association web, a button-down experience in which our information has been prepared for us by the same companies that prepare our information in the newspapers and on television.
But when I'm presented with remarks such as this from 25 years ago I wonder whether it makes sense to review here what I feel has happened to the web. Perhaps it's less that things changed, and more that the trends I (and many more) identified in these columns only intensified.
All that, of course, was in the fifth birthday celebration - the reviewing of which initiated an additional detour. For the nineteenth, that appeared after a hiatus of five years that might have suggested that even back then, as here, The Boidem had reached its end, I called on Sergeant Pepper. Then I was "off" by a year, this time by ten. When you have such a recognizable cultural icon it's hard not to make use of it. That time it was more of a comeback than a swan-song, though even as I noted that I intended to continue these columns, I also noted that:
Digitality and the internet have become so fully integrated into our lives that it's hard to imagine that someone would actually devote his or her time to examining them.
It seems that an unavoidable recurring theme in The Boidem is the question of whether or not it has/had any reason to continue.
Go to: It was thirty years ago today