PhD
Since June 2007, I’ve been writing a PhD about teenage girls, social networking, personal homepages, and media production. It should be finished sometime in 2012. I’m looking for people to interview for my study, people who remember the domains of the late ’90s, and had their own personal homepages in the community of cliques, hosting space and teenage angst. If this sounds like you, keep reading:
If you remember narcissistic.org, triggerbaby.org, heartsick.org, glitter-stars.net, electrosuicide.net, overload.nu, december-rain.org, infective.net, contaminate.org, underjoyed.org, poetic-jester.org, ambrosia.nu, explodedarling.org, deathbloom.org, mirabelle.nu, glitter.net, winternet.net, disturbance.net, vagabond.org, swanky.org, swankyarmy.net, angsty.net, 5tereo.net, scribble.nu, inherwake.com, trackstar.nu, apathy.nu, barbie.nu, geekish.org, envy.nu, deviate.org … The list goes on and on.
We were the forerunners of blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, the whole damn thing. We bought domains with pocket money, we doled out subdomains like they were candy, and we designed in colours of black, white, purple, red, and sometimes pink. We coded everything by hand, we tried all the latest in Javascript, and we bitched and ranted like nobody’s business. We were hosted between 1997(ish) and 2003(ish). We were aged between 13 and 21 (again, ish). We were girls - but there were boys too, if we let them in the clubhouse door.
We were mostly girls, we were all geeks, and we were very angsty!
If this rings a bell - if ‘clique’ was a way of life, and ‘hosting’ was a precious gift - and if you want to talk about it, participate in my PhD research and have your experience documented, email me.
