#suck.com

[mortifiedandawesome]

[cherykrush]

[btrandolph]

“always traveling, never arriving”

(suck.com, jan 1996) 

from the days when people put real effort into making the web a huge waste of time

The Bookmark Less Traveled

At this week's MacWorld Expo, we

saw the future of the Web.

Admittedly, we didn't exactly

see the future of the Web - as

with the Queen's sorrows in

Richard II, the software

products at MacWorld were "like

perspectives, which rightly

gazed upon/Show nothing but

confusion, eyed awry/Distinguish

form."

The future of the Web? Bookmarks.

If all portents come in threes,

MacWorld was no exception.

There, we found CyberFinder,

WebArranger, and DragNet,

all designed to manage and

organize your bookmarks. The

implicit assumption of these

products, of course, is that

you have a good many bookmarks

to manage and organize.

metaphorical

For a brief moment, let's

reconnect to the original

"bookmark" metaphor: a bookmark

of the non-cyber variety, if we

recall, is used to mark a place

within a book, in order to

continue on from that point at

some later time. True, this

function did spawn its own

industry - that of the mass

production of the laminated

bookmark, which, for whatever

reasons, became a repository for

some of the world's most

appalling Christian imagery. But

never did traditional media

cause us to purchase a product

in order to "manage" our

bookmarks - with the possible

exception of the waste basket.

It's not as the futurists

predicted - an informational

economy, based on the processing

of facts and data. No one's

processing the information they

come across on the Web - hell,

we don't even read it. Nope,

they just note that a site might

have some value at some unknown

later date, bookmark it, and

move on, to bookmark the next

unread site. Always traveling,

never arriving. Rather than an

informational economy, we're

still trapped within the same

libidinal economy of consuming

desire, made pure - 

if you never eat, you never have to shit

The old media analogy, of course,

would be walking into a

bookstore in order to purchase

the latest edition of Books in

Print. Or walking into a library

and borrowing the card catalog.

Consider bookmarking as Reader's

Digest Condensed Books taken to

their logical conclusion - why

mess with an abridged version or

abstract when you can have a

work distilled down to its very

essence, its title?

We like to think of bookmarks as

bullets - many get a perverse

sense of security from having

them around, but most, in the

end, are afraid to use them,

given their ability to explode

heads. Bookmarks or bullets,

something bad would probably

come of their use - but it's

undeniably good to hold them in

reserve, just in case something

scary shows up on your front

door. Bookmark 'em all, let God

sort 'em out.

[kellytsn]

Sometimes... my life really does Suck.Com -_- I'd be very scared to go to that site, mind...

Erm...me?

[barthel]

Rememberence of blogs past

In 2000, I would be sitting in the basement of the Alumni Magazine (in a repurposed house next to the student union, marooned in the snow), and on breaks from my editorial assistant position I would get on the older Mac (pre-iMac!) we used for layout and read Suck. At some point in all this browsing I came across the idea of a blog. And for the life of me I can't remember how this happened, but somehow the term I Googled - or, uh, Yahoo!ed - led me not to like BoingBoing or something, but this other site that, for all I knew, was a totally legit blog. There were posts in reverse-chronological order, it was written in the personal voice, there were links, the whole shebang. I didn't see what the big deal was. It took me weeks to figure out that it was actually a fake promotional blog Macromedia was using to help launch a new version of Fireworks. I didn't know! I already couldn't get half the reference on Suck, nor could I reliably tell when they were kidding, so for all I knew the fake blog was just an elaborate prank I wasn't getting. Nowadays I think I wouldn't have any problem telling the difference, but is that because I got more experience with blogs or because blogs themselves became a more stable, recognizable form? I dunno.

Anyway, I used to be even less able to tell my ass from my elbow, is the point here.