E/N or Everything / Nothing – Thank You

I’ve alluded in previous posts about a time before all the rest of you bloggers existed in the blogosphere. Actually, it’s a time before the word “blog” was even around – those of us in the scene at the time just had webpages, and we wrote about our daily lives, and our existence as a whole.  Other people read, commented and shared in our joy or sorrows.  There was no WordPress, for a long time we uploaded everything via FTP (how many of us had 20 demos of CuteFTP on their machines?).  Greymatter came along and eventually Movable Type, but there wasn’t the standardization in layouts or ideas you see today.  There were no “mommy bloggers”, no “daddy bloggers”, there was just us, in all our nerdy glory.  This community was defined as the E/N community, or “Everything/Nothing” because that’s what we wrote about – everything and nothing, all at the same time.

We didn’t do any of these “give aways” that you guys do today, we had full on games like SurvivorCam 1 – 4 where people were required to participate in challenges and then the general internet populous voted on an eliminated players.   We had an entire website, Internetgossip.com dedicated to following our drama – and believe me, there was a lot of it.  There was no twitter, or facebook, or even myspace.  There were message boards and IRC chat rooms.  Many of us had Amazon wishlists in which strangers would buy us gifts, shit, to this day I still have some of the books and blankets that people bought me off of mine. In the days before Dooce, The Bloggess, and all the sites you read today, there was StileProject, Wondergirl and Mija.nu.

We somehow made ourselves into this family unit.  We did stuff like hop on planes and go halfway around the world to meet each other, take a 3 1/2 day bus ride while under the age of 18 to stay with some internet friends.  (What would the parents of today say if they found that out?)  We had each others cell phone numbers and we talked to each other, and about each other, like we had met in real life.  In fact, some of us became real life friends from the scene.  (Ashley Brent, I’m looking at you.)

Somewhere around 2003 – 2004 though, we all stopped.  Some of us moved to livejournal, some of to deviantArt.  Some of us got husbands and wives, and some of us got children.  Some of us went to school, and some of us went through rough times.  The point is, we all stopped, and the internet became what it is today, filled with political bloggers, and mommy bloggers… there is less a sense of community in the scene today.  It’s not like it once was.

A couple days ago, Joey wrote a post on his livejournal where he opined about the lost scene… and a couple of us started commenting about our memories of the time.  We waxed nostalgic about all the people we knew, and the lives we had.  Yesterday, I created a facebook group called E/N and added some of the people that I knew, and they added more people, and those people added more people, and before I knew it the group was a full on love fest of people who hadn’t seen each other online in years.  It was like a high school reunion, but in the best possible way.   We discussed how difficult it is to share those memories with your friends and family – how do you explain you were once internet famous, or that the person you’re talking to on the phone you’ve known for 10 years but never actually met… One of the most fun things we did was post before and after pictures…

Here's mine - apparently I haven't changed one bit.

It was awesome.  Because you know, because you guys came along and started your blogs, there was us.  Paving the way for you – and you don’t even remember us.

So, here’s to all the original internet warriors, the drama, the gossip, the fun and games… even though the rest of the internet doesn’t thank you, I remember, and I do.

And if any of you want to leave memories of the scene here, a beacon if you will so other people from that time can find us on the web, you should.  I love to hear about it.  :)

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