GeoCities and diaries on the early web

GeoCities was a web hosting service that launched in 1995. It appealed to people because at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, it offered them the ability to create websites about themselves, their interests, and their lives. This chapter examines the character and form of a selection of diaries hosted on GeoCities between 1995 and 2001. In these diaries GeoCities users tested the boundaries between public and private on the early web. The chapter proceeds in four parts. The first part offers some contextual background and the second a discussion of method. Third, I look at web diaries whose creators experimented with self-projection by combining aspects of the diary form with the nascent web technologies that GeoCities offered. Fourth and finally, I examine those GeoCities diaries that--in variety of ways--replicated private, paper-based diaries. This blend of experimental and conservative, and of public and private diary writing provides a valuable window into ways in which identities were negotiated and performed circa 1995-2001.