One of the nice features of this website is that I have an administration page which has a traffic referral log. What this means is that I have a list of the sites that have a link to mine and a record of how many people have followed that link to find me.
This is interesting as it allows me to visit their sites and a) find out what theyÂ’ve said about me and b) read sites that I would otherwise never come across.
I hadnÂ’t really appreciated how many people kept daily diaries (or blogs as they are called by the internerd community), and it is fascinating to get a glimpse into the lives and concerns of other people. As a history graduate (I feel a fraud calling myself that as I did very little work and learnt practically nothing at college, for which I have partial regret) I think itÂ’s ace that there is an accessible record of thousands of ordinary peopleÂ’s daily lives, something which is not true of any other historical period. We are restricted to the warped accounts of the lives of the great and the good and the evil, but know next to nothing about what life was like for the vast majority of people (only archaeology gives us an idea of some of the stuff they chucked away, not how they felt, or what concerned them. But hey, you can read Excavating Rita if youÂ’re really interested in this idea!).
Admittedly at the moment these accounts are mainly by teenage girls and strange men in their thirties who donÂ’t have proper jobs and spend too much time in a room on their own with their computer (do I mean me? How dare I talk about myself like that? I'm not a teenage girl at all), and possibly itÂ’s a bit grandiose to imagine that the alien historians of the future will be interested in anything we have to say. But itÂ’s a start.
Never mind the historical aspect, if nothing else it is incredible privilege for us to get a glimpse into the lives of people that we will never meet. I particularly like the random way that you can chance across a website. I notice that someone put the phrase ““ten-pin bowling”+ “oxford”” into google, presumably looking for a place to bowl in Oxford, but instead chanced across my account of an evening at Streatham Megabowl with two other (similarly fraudulent) Oxford graduates!
In the last few days IÂ’ve read about:
How a bi-sexual girlÂ’s boyfriend feels about her snogging another woman (amazingly he wasnÂ’t all that happy about it. Personally I would have been delighted);
How fantastic it was to be on the “Stop the War” march (which will be an interesting historical source whichever way things turn out);
Someone getting an umbrella as a Valentine DayÂ’s present;
A man who is comparing singles from the same week in different decades (categorised by chart position);
Several people who have taken up the CNPS challenge.
People are able to express their uncensored opinions and get immediate feedback from the half dozen or several hundred people who visit their site. Yes a lot of it is irrelevant or nonsense or plain wrong, but I love it all the same.
For the first time I feel the web like nature of this invention, and it's a web that connects us, rather than trapping us.
