The Site as Self - Swarthmore College Bulletin

In 1987, John Futterman ’77 returned to Christianity after 20 years of atheism. That same year, he also took a job designing nuclear weapons.

Futterman, who was hired as a nuclear design physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California, had wrangled with the morality of nuclear weapons before he rediscovered Christianity. But the apparent hypocrisy of designing weapons of mass destruction and upholding the sixth commandment made his thoughts more urgent. He began keeping journals, writing essays on nuclear weapons, Christianity, and the intricate tango the two dance, as well as the intersection of science and religion.

The essays became a book--first titled The Bomb and The Cross, then Man Bites Dogma--explaining how the two pursuits could morally coexist in one man. But it did not fare well at the publishing houses. The book, cobbled together from his journals, was too eclectic. He soon realized it wasn’t going to be published.

Yet Futterman suspected that there was an audience for the intelligent application of Christian thought to the realities of modern life. His tolerant brand of Christianity, he thought, might appeal to those looking for an alternative to the “canned theology” dispensed at most churches.

So in 1996, he built his own church.

His is no small-scale operation. Each month, Futterman ministers to around 4,500 people. His church has a chapel, a pulpit, a school, even a graveyard.

It also exists only as ones and zeros.

That is to say, John Futterman’s Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua has no physical existence, unless you count the single magnetic disk that contains the HTML code for the Web pages found at www.dogchurch.org.

Futterman is one of the still-growing legion of amateurs who fuel so much of the interesting content of the World Wide Web. Rarely paid for the time they invest in their sites, these amateurs do what they do--and they do just about everything--solely for the love of doing it. From virtual churches to Napster, much of what makes you think, laugh, or flinch on the Internet is the creation of an amateur.

It’s no surprise, then, that Swarthmoreans, especially recent graduates, have taken to the Web. For Futterman, his virtual church allows him to “try to get folks from very different backgrounds to engage in reasonable dialogue. I’m trying to point toward alternative ways to be, ways of living with the contradictions of being human.”

Although he sells T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with the Blind Chihuahua to help cover site expenses, it is Futterman’s passion to “take over the world for basic virtues” that he says drives him.

Futterman’s Web site offers some of his answers to the questions and challenges that confront virtue in modern times, including how he reconciles Christianity and nuclear weapons. Alongside his own views, however, Futterman also presents counterpoints to his arguments written by other contributors to his site.

“I want to provoke thought. If people themselves say what they need to hear, then they have to confront that,” Futterman says. “I want people to come up with their own answers; those are the ones that are important.”

If his devotion to his virtual church seems religious, it should come as no surprise. The amateur ethos has always included sharing one’s pursuits and passions with others. Indeed, the Web itself often inspires such religious fervor.

Nowhere is that fervor better embodied than in Justin Hall ’98. As one of the pioneers of the personal home page, Hall merged his personal life with the Web at www.links.net beginning in 1994. The result has been more than 2,100 interconnected, hand-coded Web pages that hold nothing back, often stripping away layers of self-censorship to reveal Hall’s mind at work.

Documenting his life passionately, Hall, who now lives in Oakland, Calif., has filled his pages with stories, links, ramblings, poems, and pictures. He took time off from Swarthmore later in 1994 to work at HotWired, the on-line extension of Wired magazine, and was often cast--both at the College and on the Net--as a “Web guru,” the strange, dreadlocked missionary of the “Internet tribe,” as one Swarthmore professor termed Hall’s peer group.

For Hall, who has since shorn his locks, the Web is the “most natural and fantastic means by which to share your thoughts.” Its immediacy, its nonlinearity, and its capacity to cross boundaries and allow readers to respond captivated Hall, and his site rapidly became one of the most visited sites of the Web’s salad days.

Hall wasn’t alone, though. The appeal of the new medium attracted a number of other Swarthmore students, including Ethan Holland ’98 and Dominic Sagolla ’96.

Holland, who now manages the Burpee Plant & Seed Web site (www.burpee.com) and plays drums in two bands in Philadelphia, was first introduced to the potential of the Internet through Gopher, an early file-sharing protocol. “In 1993, Pat Donaghy ’99, then a freshman on my hall in Willetts, used Gopher to pull out all sorts of crazy stuff from the Internet--pictures, stories, sound clips, whatever we could find.” Sagolla also got hooked on the Internet through Gopher and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), through which he maintained a fileserver to share interesting software and sound clips with other students.

When Mosaic 0.9, one of the first graphical Web browsers, was introduced in 1994, what once required substantial technical know-how to produce became significantly easier. But there wasn’t much out there.

“In 1994, I surfed the entire Web in a weekend,” Sagolla says in an e-mail interview from San Francisco, where he works as a freelance Web developer. “Then Justin wrote an HTML page, and it seemed like you could always get there within three or four clicks.”

Sagolla and Holland were quick to follow. Sagolla wrote a simple page to “share sounds and stories with folks at other colleges.” Shortly thereafter, he became fascinated by the Web’s capacity for rapid feedback, an attribute he knew to be useful for writers and academicians. The fascination led him to publish The Phoenix on-line and to help maintain the first “virtual tour” of the College.

Today, Sagolla’s current personal site, www.dom.net, is an evolving project focusing on music, creative storytelling, and education. Much of his site builds on his experiences with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and as a Web developer for the MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning group.

“The power and potential of the Web for teachers, learners, and school systems has yet to be realized,” Sagolla says. Among other things, he says, the Web can “bring students together within schools” and “change the role of the teacher.”

Holland’s site, www.ethanb.com, provided him an education in the power and the pitfalls of the Web itself. “Minimalistic” at first, the site ballooned as Holland grew more captivated by his initial Web publishing experiences.

“I was addicted in the beginning,” Holland says. “I kept a daily journal, I wrote essays on everything I could, I reviewed every movie I saw. It was just a release for me.”

Holland’s movie reviews and essays became popular, even making their way onto the syllabus of a film class at the University of Richmond. Holland enjoyed reading e-mail from Web surfers inspired to action by his stories--in particular, his tale of taking a semester off to go to Vail, Colo., without a job or any money.

But as the Web grew, its downsides became more obvious to Holland. Its immediacy constantly demanded his time and attention, and always being within reach exposed him more fully than he liked.

“When Justin was around, he made it seem so gung-ho, like his way was normal. His enthusiasm was contagious,” Holland says. “But as the Web became more popular, it became obvious to me that you’re either going to be the craziest and most popular, or you’re not.”

As more people visited his site, Holland began to feel self-conscious about it--“like I was branding myself”--and eventually decided to take down almost all of the written personal content. “I didn’t want to interact personally with people anymore through the Web site,” he says.

Now Holland’s site primarily features the bands he has played in, both at the College and since graduating. Although he no longer shares the details of his personal life with the public, the Web, he says, has been an excellent way to share his music.

Hall sees the growth of the Web differently. “In 1994, it felt like the Web was quietly sleeping,” he says. “Now it’s teeming, it’s rich, it’s throbbing...;. On a day-to-day basis, I feel like my navel is hooked up to this giant tub of warm liquid information, and it makes me feel alive and powerful.”

“Justin is able to be so enthusiastic and honest about everything,” Holland says. “He’s like an evangelist about the Web.”

But when asked if he considered himself a Web evangelist, Hall launched into a careful dissection of the term.

“Evangelist? I picture someone like Elmer Gantry, someone who pushes ideas for his ego rather than for the ideas themselves,” Hall says. “That’s not a nuanced view. I just feel so wonderful about the Web that I want to share it.”

But, he adds, “I think I was a Web evangelist, especially in ’96.” Seconds later, he bursts into an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek impression of himself as Elmer Gantry, hyping the Web tent-revival style. Laughing, he settles back down and says, “I love the Web. Maybe if it was Jesus that I loved, I could have shared my love forever. But the thing I could share was wrapped up with AOL and Netscape and Microsoft and the Department of Justice and so many other issues--I could no longer look myself in the eye and believe that the Web was a solution to an enormous number of problems.”

Hall’s recent unwillingness to push the Web as a societal panacea hasn’t diminished the enthusiasm with which he approaches the Web in his own life. A professional amateur of sorts, Hall turned his passion into his profession. With big business’s embrace of the Internet, he says, “These days I wear a suit and tie and fly business class to Tokyo and give speeches in Sweden and write strategy documents for corporate leaders. In some ways, I’ve been embraced by capitalism, and the payments from that capitalism fuel my personal explorations,” which he continues to detail on-line.

Despite the recent implosion of the dot-com boom, Hall has no plans to stop publishing on the Web. “I haven’t let the fact that I can’t make a lot of money doing this stand in my way,” Hall says. “I’d like to hope that I could do what I do and eventually get paid directly for it.”

Indeed, the self-determination the Web has offered individuals is perhaps its most thrilling (and ego-feeding) aspect. When Anne-Marie Otey ’88, a fashion reporter for People magazine in Los Angeles, pitched a celebrity fashion column to her editors and had it shot down as a “move in the wrong direction” in the summer of 1998, she decided to take her efforts to the Web. Today, her celebrity fashion column is The Dish at www.fashiondish.com, the site she started after leaving People.

“I wanted to do something really independent,” Otey says. “People already had a corporate culture, and it was growing stronger, even before the AOL-TimeWarner merger.”

Otey found a little funding to get the site off the ground and launched it in September 1998. Although the site now supports itself, Otey has to take consulting jobs to support herself and is currently seeking syndication deals for the column. Despite the extra work and a smaller audience than she had at People, she savors the control she has and the feedback she receives.

“Writing regularly without desk rewrites has helped develop my voice, which I hope reflects a sense of fun and style,” Otey says. “But the greatest part of the Web is that the cat can speak to the queen. The responses are much quicker. There’s a sense of democracy.”

All of which fits neatly into her hopes of eroding the fashion “dictatorship,” the designers and magazines that make haute couture the domain of the cultural elite. “The Web in some ways bridges the ‘fashion gap,’” she says. “The site tries to look at fashion from the ground up and make it more accessible. The celebrities help make fashion more attractive, but fashion comes from within.”

The jump has paid off for Otey--not financially but personally.

I have had no problems losing the connections and the exposure of People,” she says. “One person can create a far larger impact on the Internet. I’d take my 100,000 hits over People any day.”

The interactions that Otey so savors are the specialty of Valerie Casey ’94. As the strategic interactive director at Pentagram Design in San Francisco, she specializes in understanding how users interact with their environment and technology, including Web sites, and develops new ways to draw users into the experience. Her personal site, www.valcasey.com, is an opportunity for her to explore those experiences.

“My design breaks a lot of ‘usability’ rules,” Casey says in an e-mail interview. “I did that intentionally to promote the importance of the journey as well as the destination and to say that a rich Web experience does not have to be entirely obvious and guided.”

Her interest in nonlinear narratives, film, and photography give Casey a chance to experiment with novel interfaces that clients would likely avoid. “Most clients favor supporting user interfaces with oversimplified and overstructured interactions,” Casey says. “There is an amazing potential in the digital world that we could easily overlook if we always design the same interaction.” On the current incarnation of her site, Casey forsakes dictating users’ expectations in favor of letting them discover the multiple levels of the site for themselves.

Casey’s Web site also allows her to move fluidly between the personal and the professional.

“I update portions of my site all the time--at work and at home. If I come across a great link or idea, I’ll post it immediately,” Casey says. “I’m always working on the content--shooting video, film, or photos. The research I do at work influences my personal projects, and my personal projects inspire my professional work. The content represents markers of my thinking--little milestones or epiphanies. They happen all the time, and I put some of them on my Web site to think through them. Making the private public pushes the idea to another level.”

Posting her work on the Web also opens it to contributions from anyone who sees it. The feedback from viewers, she says, helps produce and change the thoughts that went into the original works.

“My work is always evolving and going in different directions--it’s rarely ‘finished,’” Casey says. “I put ideas up in text or photos or film clips to start a conversation...;. As I evolve it, the concepts reflect others’ ideas as well as mine.”

For Casey, Hall, Futterman, and others, the constant evolution of their sites--and themselves--through their own hands and through others’ is a reminder of the Web’s potential to tear down boundaries. Take it from Futterman--the former nuclear weapons designer who now leads a group using the Internet to help the government rapidly analyze and respond to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “The Web is going to change the course of human knowledge,” he says. “In its final extension, it will change what it means to know something.”

Justin Kane ’02, an Honors philosophy major, was editor of The Phoenix during his sophomore and junior years.