In the dawn of the World Wide Web (which I began surfing in 1995), there wasn’t a huge amount of original content being created and posted. The lack of original content can be contributed to three major factors:
– Complexity/Costs: With no freely available Content Management Systems (CMS), those wishing to publish to the web had to learn at least HTML and FTP at a minimum. In the early days, there was a steep learning curve in getting your thoughts and ideas on the web. There was also a financial side to hosting content — many ISPs did not automatically include a web site with their basic plans.
– Lack of Audience: With so few web surfers, creating and posting new content on the web seemed kind of pointless. It took a few years for enough people to get on board to make posting web-specific content worth the effort.
– Links: To really understand this part, you have to understand where the web came from. Prior to the World Wide Web, most people accessing the Internet got their information from FTP sites, Gopher links, and occasionally through Archie (how quickly things become obsolete). All three of these methods hosted text files for others to be able to find and access them. When the web was learning to walk, its first role was essentially to serve as a graphical user interface (GUI) to all those text files. As a result, many early web pages consisted of little more lists of links point pointing to other people’s (previously written) text files. It was interesting at first, but when hundreds of web sites all pointed to the same few files written by the same few people, it got pretty boring.
Eventually, and fortunately, creative people began permeating this newfound medium. I Most of the early content that went up would be considered web PAGES, but eventually, people began putting up web SITES. It seems strange to discuss the differences between the two, but what I mean is, most early pages were simply a couple of standalone pages with information or links on them. As these grew they became sites: large, intertwined groups of pages that instead of linking readers to external sources, contained all the information they were presenting on their own pages.
One of the first such sites that I remember discovering was a page called The Big Fun Glossary. “Big Fun” was a giant, three-story farmhouse, located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Sometime in 1995, three girls (Sara, Jessika and Peggy, known as the Malvern Girls) moved into Big Fun; soon, several of their friends had joined them. From what I have read, Big Fun sounds like a cross somewhere between MTV’s The Real World and Charles Manson’s Spahn Ranch. While no murders were ever conspired (or at least committed) at Big Fun, wild kids did what unsupervised wild kids do: they drank, they did drugs, they partied, they acted goofy, they collected doll heads, they spray painted things, they mummified animal corpses, they did all sorts of interesting and quasi-legal adventures that are interesting to read about.
One of the inhabitants of Big Fun (“The Gus”) chronicled the group’s adventures in a giant document that came to be known as the Big Fun Glossary. Consisting of over 50 pages of definitions, the document was frequently printed, copied, passed around among friends and amended. Every in-joke, made up definition and person was written down and preserved within the glossary’s pages.
As most of the inhabitants of Big Fun had little or no money, living conditions took a turn for the worse during the winter of 1995. Before long electricity to the house was shut off (generators and gas heaters were brought in to keep the inhabitants warm). Eventually the housemates also lost running water. Eventually, life at Big Fun began not to be so much fun, and in the spring of 1996 most of the inhabitants moved back to the city. The entire experience lasted less than a year, from the Fall of 1995 to the summer of 1996.
The Gus landed a job at a local Internet Service Provider (ISP), and soon converted The Big Fun Glossary into a website. The Glossary, which remains online today, reeks of 1996 web design. There are frequent warnings of “giant, 700k downloads.” What photographs are on the site are small in size, the background graphics break in any normal-sized browser, and the design is decidedly static. That being said, the Glossary serves its purpose and acts as a time capsule, capturing the life, times, thoughts, and happenings in and around the inhabitants of Big Fun.
With all the weird and wacky jokes related to the Big Fun crew, it is sometimes difficult to remember that these are all, in fact, real people. The Gus, now 39, maintains his own blog to this day. A simple Google search turned up Jessika Flint’s Friendster Page, which leads to both her eBay Store and her own domain. Some of the other Malvern maniacs have online presences as well; I’ll let you do the searching, if you’re interested.
It’s hard to explain what my fascination with the Big Fun site is, but for some reason I revisit it maybe once a year or so. The site never changes, but there is so much to take in that, within a year’s time, all the stories and adventures (or at least the details regarding them) seem fresh again. I am sure that the thought of living in such squalor sounds like much more fun than it really is; and, by the time you get to the end of the timeline, it doesn’t even sound like that much fun. Fantastic romantacism, perhaps.
If you find yourself bored someday and wish to kill a few hours reading about a bunch of kids getting high by drinking cough syrup, stealing bear from a local cult’s end of the world party, and a general collection of tales of debauchery, check out the Big Fun Glossary.