I began my online life in the mid 190s while pursuing my undergraduate degree in English at the University of Toronto. I was reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan and studying with three of his former colleagues. In each case, they said his work had been influenced by modernist literature - the very type of literature I was most interested in. While I couldn’t immediately see the connection between James Joyce, McLuhan and cyberspace my online life truly began between the spines of Ulysses and Understanding Media.
In the late 1998s the only website tool within my technical reach was Homestead, a simple site builder that was all just dragging and dropping widgets into prefab backgrounds. You could fiddle around with font colours and background textures but not much more. I built a few individual pages to share my creative writing but did so anonymously - the web just didn’t feel safe enough to me then (ironic since it was likely much safer than it is now). My excitement about all the web had to offer led to further explorations of online writing, life, community and culture.
In the winter of 2001, I enrolled in the fledgling online writing program at Centennial College where I learned about web usability, hypertext writing and basic website design and construction using HTML and Dreamweaver. That same semester I joined an established private vc where I engaged in serious conversations about the social, cultural, political and educational dimensions of life online. It’s also where I took my first stab at a virtual journal - or web log - available to other members. The log allowed for commenting, bookmarking and subscription, which were the early forms of permalinks, socialbookmarks and RSS. Beyond the tiny blogosphere of the late 1990s [1], blogs and bloggers were still relatively misunderstood and, largely, regarded with derision.
Later that year, I learned how to code in HTML and published my first online article in Mindjack Magazine (Reading McLuhan). I also began working as a web content writer creating cross platform web narrative for national and independent media. A year later while writing Linkedout: Blogging, Equality and the Future, I created a semi-anonymous blog of my own for research purposes. In 2003-2004, I started receiving beta invitations to emerging social networks like Orkut, Tribes, Flickr, where I began to observe critically important differences between the users and developers of these tools.
Throughout my life online, I have inhabited a variety of different incarnations of the technological adoption lifecycle - as both citizen blogger and professional writer. My experiences as both “amateur” and “professional” have led me to new ideas about expertise and authority - who is really an “insider” and who is really an “outsider.”
One of my motivating philosophies is the belief that web2.0 offers an historically unprecedented opportunity to build and create a better world - if only we think carefully about what kind of world we want. I am also especially passionate about the potential of open source tools and participatory culture as a means of enabling digital democracy and diminishing the digital divide.
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