10 years of Flick Filosopher: my, how the Web has changed

Boy, it’d be interesting now to go back and look at Home Page again. This 1999 documentary about the Internet was shot in 1996, which might as well be a hundred years ago:

A frontier culture may change the mother culture, but frontiers eventually get tamed, and we see the beginning of that in Home Page. Block follows Hall as he takes a break from school to travel the country, a streetpreacher for the Web, speaking in coffeehouses and community organizations, spreading the good word. But in retrospect, Hall's most important stop may have been his presentation to the Newspaper Association of America. Both funny and sobering to watch, Hall -- a gender bender who wears skirts and piles his long, dreadlocked hair atop his head -- is an insane wildman passing on his knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm for the Web to a room full of dour, middle-aged men in suits. The former may have been the embodiment of the Internet in 1996, but the latter are trying to be such today.

• review of Home Page, posted 11.19.99

(Technorati tags: Home Page, Justin Hall)