I encountered the phenomenon of personal pages the very first time I logged
on to the Internet. It was something that had never existed before in the ordinary world. Usually you meet people first and only get to know intimate
details of their lives later. Personal pages on the Internet turn the whole process
around. The great majority of these pages are something like the following: you learn your new acquaintance's name, date and place of birth, where he or she works and what his or her interests are, and then you see a photo, usually taken on a holiday or at a party. The most popular are the photographs where you see your new acquaintance bathing in the sea, or stroking a dog or horse, or dancing or doing something sporty. If your new acquaintance is a woman, you will often see a modelling agency sort of photo, and if it's a man, he will want to be
pictured in a gleaming automobile. Then you find out about your acquaintance's tastes in the way of books, films and music and his or her erotic idols. You'll
see childhood snaps amd you can click on links to the person's friends and favourite servers. You can read his or her "motto".
In just ten minutes you know so much about him or her, but you still haven't met. And perhaps you never will. But still you already have your own opinion about the person. You can write him or her an e-mail, and perhaps get an answer. You have some kind of relationship with the person. Yes, you have an acquaintance, but the question is - who that acquaintance actually is. Is it really the person whose homepage you are reading, or is that just a person your acquaintance would like to be seen as? Or is it a person you would like to see?
Isn't the picture of your acquaintance something you alter with the brush and
paints of your own ideas? Your imagination? Or on the other hand, what if this apparent self-portrait of your acquaintance is the work of a cheat?
Most often, both of these possibilities are true at the same time.
Be that as it may, millions of personal pages are sailing through the universe
of the Internet. I see them as lonely cries out into the darkness, attempts to make
contact with an unknown civilisation. Above all they are communiqués of our own existence.
The Rosie homepage started out in the same way as the pages of the
cheats I have mentioned. For example. A cheat will create a homepage in the following style: I am an attractive young blonde. I like music and sex. Write to me." Add a couple of nice photographs and suddenly the cheat will receive plenty of love letters over the e-mail. It's a great way to fill up the time and the cheat busily keeps up the correspondence. Why? I don't know. Maybe because on his old home page he had honestly written something like, "I'm
a very overweight bald football fan with plenty of frustrated sexual energy", and nobody much had responded.
I have been creating the Rosie Homepage (later under the title City.html) in stages, with long gaps in between. It started as a typical girl's homepage, but then a story began to develop involving more characters. The story uses the resources of the Internet, such as the combination of sound, picture and hypertext. Apart from being excited by the new technical
possibilities, I have been mainly inspired by the strange atmosphere of the
unreal world of the Internet, in which we receive information only through
the monitor. It is a world of fictive homepages and informal communication with friends we know only under their Internet identities. It is a place where you can be whatever you want. Ultimately you can even "become yourself" in the sense of no longer being defined and limited by your reflection in the mirror. It is a space in which you don't know what is reality and what is "only" illusion.
And in the end - why do you want to know?
The author
