JISCMail - WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE Archives

This post has become a monstrously long history of my (mostly early) involvement with the internet. I am sorry for the length... If anyone actually reads it, I'd be happy for feedback, especially from people who remember the early internet and those who have done collaborative web projects without funding or official backing. I am not one of those people who says everything was better in the old days, but I am nostalgic for the early noncommercial internet which was so interesting sociologically, and I am curious to hear other people's stories of the Good Old Days!

My name is Millie Niss. I am a freelance poet and web artist. My personal web art/literary site is www.sporkworld.org . My web art (interactive multimedia) has been published on The Iowa Review Web, trAce (UK), Rhizomes/hyperrhiz, bannerarts.org, wordcircuits.com, The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That (Brazil), thirdplacegallery.org (Scandinavia), and many others. My poetry and prose has also been widely published online (and some in print). I studied mathematics (undergrad degree and some grad school), writing (an aborted MFA program), and have worked as a computer programmer, in mental health services and advocacy, and in math (and briefly experimental 3D-visualization in a medical setting) research, as well as at some very terrible part-time temp jobs.

I currently am "independent," which means I don't have the comfort of a university or professional affiliation, but on the other hand, I do only projects that I like. I co-author many web pieces with Martha Deed, who is also on this list and who happens to be my mother. I have done some other web art and writing collaborations, and hope to do more. I have done several poetry readings, mostly in the Buffalo, NY area, and have sometimes even been paid as a featured reader. I live near Buffalo (actually, in North Tonawanda, NY, which you can see in its full lack of glory in the video "Jewel of the Erie Canal," which I made with Martha http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/nt.html ) and in New York City.

I learned of this list because I had previously been a little involved with the trAce Online Writing Centre, which Sue Thomas used to direct. I had a multimedia work published on the trAce site in 2003 (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame/index.cfm?article=69) and I gave a workshop on sound poetry in Flash at the 2004 trAce Incubation3 Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I also wrote an article on my web art for trAce in late 2004 (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Process/index.cfm?article=122 ) That article is a brief introduction to my work.

I also spent a lot of time on the trAce site viewing other people's work, and I think trAce was a great resource for the literary internet. There are relatively few sites/journals that embrace both writing (in a "literary" and somewhat academic context) and technically innovative multimedia, and the work published by trAce and produced by them in various projects and collaborations really filled this niche. Soon after I wrote my article, I heard that Sue Thomas was leaving trAce. I don't know what trAce will be like with different leadership, but I certainly hope it continues to promote litarary web work and collaborations with writers, teachers, and scientists, as it did during Sue's tenure. At the same time, of course, I wish Sue Thomas well in her new work, and I have really enjoyed this list so far. I would be interested in hearing more from her about other aspects of her new work and the group she is with now.

My internet presence started when I was in college (at Columbia University in NYC, where I studied math), using the "old" (pre-web) internet which was basically text-only. I learned Unix systems administration then, and was involved in various internet-based groups (for example, the USENET newsgroups, discussion forums (fora?) which now are available via Google Groups) and collaborations. My first real-life involvement with an internet-based group was organizing a real-life dinner for the New York City members of the group rec.arts.books (a book discussion group). I discovered that the other members I had been communicating with were sophisticated (to me) yuppies who ate wine and cheese and had every issue of obscure literary journals but worked by day selling financial instruments. This was a bit of a shock to me since I was a young (still underage) college student and I (mistakenly) thought that anyone involved with _money_ was a philistine sellout...

I was also involved in academic research on the internet, co-authoring papers with mathematicians (I did computer-based computations for computerphobic mathematicians, which resulted in getting my name on obscure articles and a book about math that I did not understand at all because only ten people in the world understood it). I was impressed with the collaborative writing and research possibilities offered by the net (this is all pre-web, mind you!). I used open source tools like the technical document preparation system TeX (which lets you type any kind of symbolic math from an ascii keyboard and also does many advanced typesetting tasks; of course it is essentially a computer language, not WSIWYG software!).

My next involvement with the net was somewhat more intimate. I became ill while in college and used the internet extensively as a source of self-help and support for my medical problems. This was safer in those days than now, because there were essentially no commercial interests on the net, (in fact, a persistent urban legend of the time was that it was "illegal" to advertise online!), no viruses and scams, and people still felt that only "people like us" went online.

I eventually contributed to a very widely-distributed FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document about bipolar disorder, which was translated into many languages and reprinted on many sites (http://www.moodswing.org/bdfaq.html ) (I did the section on medications.) By then (1995) I was in math grad school, at Brown, and was a departmental sysadmin who installed a web server on the math departements computers for the first time. I held a "What is the Web?" departmental lecture and people left thinking the web was useless and newfangled and that HTML was too awkward to catch on!

One of the difficulties about contributing to the FAQ which I did not envisage was that that document stayed online much longer than it stayed up-to-date (it's now been around 10 years since it was published). The original group which wrote it has long since disbanded and no one has updated the document, but it is widely published and there is no way to retract it or add a warning about a need for new information in each spot it is published or linked to. This is of course because the web and internet (the FAQ was available via ftp and Gopher before the www was widely available) have no hierarchy and anyone can republish or link to any document without the author's control or permission. I hope my contribution has done more good than harm (and I am happy to say that nothing I said has actually proved to be WRONG; it's just that many new treatments have become available since I wrote and psychiatry practice has changed.), but it is scary to have your words stick around so long and be read by many people without your knowlede.

Had I been older and wiser when I became involved with the FAQ, or had the web itself been older, I might not have done what I did. First of all, it now seems insanely unwise to come out very publicly online as a mentally ill person (it is too late now to undo it, people only have to Google me to find out my life's story!). It really didn't occur to me at the time (this sounds incredibly stupid, but at the time, almost no one I knew in real life had ever been online, and Google and other tools to look people up did not exist) that anyone who knew me in real life would ever see my net presence, and I certainly didn't think that prospective employers or academic departments, law enforcement agencies, or grant-giving organizations would look people up as a matter of course. The online world (even though the internet at that point had over a million hosts and unknown millions of users) seemed like a small and private domain, the refuge of academics, geeks, students, and trustworthy people who shared my liberal sentiments (this last was a strange belief on my part, since I knew the Internet's origin as the successor to the Department of Defense's DARPANET)

I also don't want to get in trouble for practicing medicine without a license (of course we put disclaimers all over the FAQ, as well as consulting a psychiatrist to check it, but the FAQ was a genuine user's guide to manic depression, not the official view, and not the work of "qualified expert professionals"). Also, I did not realize how short-lived the altruistic, collaborative internet would be. In those days people (a large percentage of net users) did lots of unpaid work in collaboration with strangers, with the intention of distributing it free online. I never knew the other FAQ writers personally at all (I didn't even exchange personal email except a very few times with only one other participant), I didn't expect fame or credit (although my name has stayed attached to my contribution somehow, through all the republication), and I trusted that the others would do their share and really get the work done and published so that it could help people.

I am much more wary of putting time into online collaborations now (although I really want to collaborate with other artists), and I worry that others might take credit for my work or quit so that the work is never finished or that the work will never catch on even if it is finished, etc. Of course, the level of volunteerism that I am referring to has survived in certain geeky portions of the online world, like open source software development (in which no one cares about getting credit and people donate thousands of hours of free labor). Maybe the old net people were mostly geeks (I was, then), so that geek ethics carried over even into social or literary projects. But today's web-based Internet, useful and wonderful as it it, is not the idealistic "new, better, society" that the old internet seemed to be.

My next serious net project was more ambitious. I decided (when I was an MFA student in creative writing) to offer free, online, email-based writing courses to mentally ill people. This was motivated by my interest in teaching writing (I had participated as a student in some inspiring writing workshops), and also a desire to do something for the mentally ill. By then I was deeply involved in the mental health community, and I knew that many mentally ill folks had lost their chance at an education and could not work, and that many of these people were lonely, with their innate talents having no occasion to flourish.

I was familiar also with "programs" (especially "day programs," horrific, often mandatory, adult day care) for the mentally ill. Many of these programs purportedly used the arts (in "expressive therapies" like art or writing therapy or less ambitiously in overt and failing attempts to occupy people all day without spending any money or having enough staff to adapt the program to the individual client). The main feature of the "OT [occupational therapy] projects" which clients in these programs are forced to carry out is that they leave absolutely no room for individual creativity. A typical activity (for adults who are not mentally retarded!) is cutting out pictures from magazines and gluing them on construction paper. Another (I didn't make this up) was gluing buttons to mayonnaise jars (no, I don't know why!)

The prototypical kind of OT project was the "craft project." The craft project comes with all the materials packaged in a plastic bag distrbuted by an occupational therapy supply company, and it consists in constructing something ugly and useless by following between three and five (more would take to long pr tax the clients limited abilities) rigid steps in which the client does not have a single design choice to make. The result is supposed to be that everyone's finished product is identical, but in fact the heavily medicated, unmotivated, and distressed clients usually do the steps wrong so that each person's item is misshapen in a unique way. One typical example of a craft project (which I saw carried out at an otherwise pretty descent private psychiatric hospital) was to make frog-shaped clips (supposedly to clip documents together though most clients had no documents), made out of pre-cut, pre-sanded wooden pieces (frog body and two frog legs), a pair of googly eyes, and a clothespin for the clip. Exactly one color of green paint was provided to paint the frog pieces before gluing them together. The next step was attaching the legs to the body and the clip to the back of the body (there was another color of paint for painting the clip). Finally, you were supposed to affix the googly eyes with gue to the frog body. The other facial features (eg mouth) were pre-printed on the body. The saddest thing about this (apart from the OTs taking notes on clipborads about each patient's skills, attitude, and behavior as they engaged in this task) was that the very few patients who successfully (sic!) completed the frog seemed to be very proud of their acievement, a Pyrrhic victory indeed. (I refused to participate, no doubt earning the blackest of black marks on my chart, but I busied myself crocheting hats with the yarn and hook available in the OT room...)

Anyway, because of the horror of what was available for the mentally ill to do, I wanted to build a program which was run by mental health consumers themselves without any therapists, and which provided intellectually challenging activities in a setting which accomodated participants' disabilities but respected them as human beings. My idea was that consumers would teach free, fun courses, for the benefit of other consumers. I would do this online, so that people could teach and particpate at a distance asynchronously (ie they could do course projects at 3am if they couldn't sleep and wouldn't have to get dressed and appear in public).

I decided that I would teach writing. Instead of looking for an agency and funding and professional support, I did it the internet way, which was just to do it myself with no budget. I advertised my writing course for mentally ill people in mental health support groups and writing discussion groups online (just by posting short announcements in plain text, emphasizing the free, nonprofit nature of the thing). This of course cost nothing, and the word "spam" did not yet exist. I got maybe 50 responses to the post about my first class, and from those respondents, 20 people signed up for the course. The course itself was simply a listserv, where people could post discussion and questions, and I posted lessons, assignments, feedback to assignments, answers to questions, and participated in the discussion. In the first class (as in the subsequent two more classes), about 6 people (from all over the world, most suffering from serious mental illness) ended up really doing the class for 8-10 weeks, doing assignments and so forth. I was not disappointed with the dropouts (indeed I expected them, and knew I could only handle 5-10 students who wanted to really interact).

The first class was a mixed genre writing class with an emphasis on memoir. It was a little disorganized and not every assignment worked out perfectly. But the students enjoyed it and I was happy enough to repeat the experiment two more times. Several participants took all three classes. The second class was a much more structured curriculum on writing a short story based on character development, and it was very successful. I made an ezine (http://www.sporkworld.org/trailmix/ ) with my students' stories (I think the stories are very good. I published every student who wanted to be published -- one of the best writers decided at the end that he felt exposed by his story so I couldn't publish it, alas -- I did not pick and choose the good work). The third class was on poetry and it also went very well. One of my students turned out to be a published poet herself (she never said so until the end). She is from New Zealand and is the editor of a very selective web site which published mentally ill poets (http://www.poetrysz.net/issue16/issue.html ).

My classes were great fun and the students liked them but the program died because I was almost alone doing it and had no money and was subject to my own frequent periods of disability. For example, I set up 99% of the web site for a second issue of the trailmix ezine (to publish the poetry produced in my second class) but I got too depressed to actually upload it, and I never did it, for which I still feel bad. I wanted to make an online learning center for the mentally ill where other people would teach as well and there would be many classes, and I found a few other people who wanted to work towards this goal, but we never got it off the ground. It had a cute name (ECOLE = Experience Consumer On LIne Education), a partially-built website, and some other classes offered, but only my writing class actually worked. Other people couldn't recruit students or keep them or else they couldn't keep up with the teaching. It ended up being a disappointment.

My students were quite ill (most of them) and about half had no college experience (many of those did not finish high school). The others had done some college or some grad school, with one student who had a Masters' degree. Despite the heterogenous backgrounds of the students, I taught fairly difficult and "academic" material, only I was very informal and never let on that the topics were considered to be hard. For example, in the poetry class, I began by a lesson on the Epic (with readings from Beowiluf, Homer, and Dante-- please don't tell me that Dante didn't write Epic because he wasn't writing in the Classical period!), and continued on with Modernism (using readings that refernced classical mythology or Dante), Surrealism, various postmodernisms such as the Beats and the New York School and Langpo, the Confessionals (because of the number of mentally ill people in that movement; I emphasized Lowell and de-emphasized the histrionics of Plath and Sexton), contemporary poetry (a lot of James Tate, whose work to me seems to be a poetry of psychosis even though he seems to be quite same), concrete and visual poetry, and electronic/hypertext poetry. There were writing exercises which went with each set of readings, and students were also welcome to post poems in any style on any subject when they wanted to. I responded to each posted poem.

I would still like to publish my curricula (for fiction and poetry, not the amateurish first course) and course methods, because I think I have a model for teaching mentally ill folk online that allows them to do high level work but makes accomodations for their problems, and provides a source of social support as well as content. I've been meaning to write up a paper on my online teaching experience to present at a conference (for example the New York conference of the International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation or one of the conferences of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, where I have presented in the past).

The final phase of my involvement with the internet started in 2000, when I really got going with my own writing and then interactive web art. I was not a community leader in these fields (I didn't edit any zines), but I participated in many online discussions of web art (primarily webartery, which I now officially moderate, along with some other people), and began to get my work published on selective sites. After a few years, I began sometimes to get paid for my art or writing. I also began to present my art in real life and in print, eventually culminating with giving a workshop at the trAce Incubation3 Conference and getting a still of one of my animations published in Rachel Greene's book "Internet Art" in the Thames & Hudson world of art series in 2004.