2003 (A Digital Decade, Part 4/10)
Thursday, December 17, 2009
This is Part 4 (Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.
2003 was when the new New York, the New York we know now, really showed up. The digital industry was starting to bounce back from the bubble burst. Web 2.0 was dawning. The blogosphere had new power. Social Network Sites were on the rise. The Bush administration was accomplishing their mission in Iraq, while New Yorkers were protesting in the streets. And hipsters were beginning to recognize themselves.
It was also the year that I became an artist, a web designer, and a marketer.
In March 2003, I launched this site: mikearauz.com. The first version was nothing more than a digital resume for my acting. It had one page with a few head shots and my acting resume. Within a few months I had shaved my head and pretty much given up on my acting ambitions. This site changed along with it. Eventually turning into a place for me to share my photography, my conceptual art, and a calendar of various arts, music, and performance events happening around the city.
Some time around May 2003, I received an email from a mysterious stranger inviting me to participate in a sudden and seemingly spontaneous happening. That event, turned out to be the first of a series of what were later labeled Flash Mobs, and the mysterious man behind the email turned out to be an old college friend named Bill Wasik, now the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
. As Bill wrote about in his 2006 essay for Harper's Magazine "My Crowd, or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob", flash mobs were originally intended to be a performative commentary on the mob mentality that was loudly, but superficially, rejected by hipster culture while simultaneously defining hipster culture (a lot like Steve Martin's classic Nonconformists' Oath: Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath: I promise to be different! (audience repeats) I promise to be unique! (audience repeats) I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience laughs, repeats) Good!).
At the end of an eventful summer that included performing with an experimental long-form improv group, and experiencing The Black Out in the midst of acting in a play at the NY Fringe Festival, I finally took the plunge and quit my day job for good. Ultimately one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I became a freelance web designer/developer. I can't say enough for the benefits of understanding first hand what makes a web experience tick. The websites I designed back then were pretty rudimentary, but I learned a lot about what not to do and the difference between looking cool and actually being usable.
By the end of the year Friendster was already waning, and MySpace was on the horizon. Because I had so many musician friends who were early adopters of MySpace, I quickly followed them over.
And Greene Street Salon, the little arts organization that my friends and I had started continued to kick along. In my new found free time, I started to work on a new website for them.
2003 was when the new New York, the New York we know now, really showed up. The digital industry was starting to bounce back from the bubble burst. Web 2.0 was dawning. The blogosphere had new power. Social Network Sites were on the rise. The Bush administration was accomplishing their mission in Iraq, while New Yorkers were protesting in the streets. And hipsters were beginning to recognize themselves.
It was also the year that I became an artist, a web designer, and a marketer.
In March 2003, I launched this site: mikearauz.com. The first version was nothing more than a digital resume for my acting. It had one page with a few head shots and my acting resume. Within a few months I had shaved my head and pretty much given up on my acting ambitions. This site changed along with it. Eventually turning into a place for me to share my photography, my conceptual art, and a calendar of various arts, music, and performance events happening around the city.
Some time around May 2003, I received an email from a mysterious stranger inviting me to participate in a sudden and seemingly spontaneous happening. That event, turned out to be the first of a series of what were later labeled Flash Mobs, and the mysterious man behind the email turned out to be an old college friend named Bill Wasik, now the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
. As Bill wrote about in his 2006 essay for Harper's Magazine "My Crowd, or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob", flash mobs were originally intended to be a performative commentary on the mob mentality that was loudly, but superficially, rejected by hipster culture while simultaneously defining hipster culture (a lot like Steve Martin's classic Nonconformists' Oath: Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath: I promise to be different! (audience repeats) I promise to be unique! (audience repeats) I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience laughs, repeats) Good!).At the end of an eventful summer that included performing with an experimental long-form improv group, and experiencing The Black Out in the midst of acting in a play at the NY Fringe Festival, I finally took the plunge and quit my day job for good. Ultimately one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I became a freelance web designer/developer. I can't say enough for the benefits of understanding first hand what makes a web experience tick. The websites I designed back then were pretty rudimentary, but I learned a lot about what not to do and the difference between looking cool and actually being usable.
By the end of the year Friendster was already waning, and MySpace was on the horizon. Because I had so many musician friends who were early adopters of MySpace, I quickly followed them over.
And Greene Street Salon, the little arts organization that my friends and I had started continued to kick along. In my new found free time, I started to work on a new website for them.
1 Comments:
I'm lovin' these. Very cool stuff...
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